Archive:Agri-environmental indicator - pesticide risk

Data from March 2012. Most recent data: Further Eurostat information, Main tables and Database.

This background article contains a fact sheet of the agri-environmental indicator (AEI) pesticide risk. Together with other fact sheets, it provides an overview of the state of the agri-environmental indicators in the European Union

Indicator Definition

Index of risk of damage from pesticide toxicity and exposure.

Measurements

The conceptual and, where appropriate, modelling framework underpinning this indicator needs to be developed.

Links with other indicators

AEI 4 - Area under organic farming
AEI 6 - Consumption pesticides
AEI 10.1 - Cropping patterns
AEI 11.2 - Tillage practices
AEI 12 - Intensification/extensification
AEI 27.2 Water quality – pesticide pollution

Main findings

Main warnings

This indicator replaces the IRENA indicator 20 Pesticide soil contamination that was deemed too complex to be continued. That indicator aimed at detecting trends (increasing, decreasing, no trend) on the calculated average quantity of herbicides present in soils under cereals, maize and sugarbeet cultivation for the 1993-1999 period. However, it would not allow an assessment of the potential increase in environmental risk associated with higher pesticide sales or use volumes. The new indicator Pesticide risk is meant to address this issue.
Directive 0128/2009 establishing a framework for Community action to achieve the sustainable use of pesticides states that all Member States shall establish a set of harmonised risk indicators. However, as these risk indicators have not yet been agreed, the work on this AEI has been put on hold for the time being, the logic being that identifying an additional indicator outside the work carried out within the framework of legislation would not be appropriate.
Homogeneous and comparable pesticide usage data for Europe are currently lacking, see AEI 6 Consumption of pesticides, Regulation 2009/1185 concerning statistics on pesticides will improve this; data on sales of pesticides will be available beginning 2013, and data on the use in 2015.

Context

Introduction

Pesticide risk can be defined with reference to a specified endpoint (ecosystems, humans, stock of environmental resources). Although risk in a rigorous sense is not easy to define, many risk indicators can be computed and aggregated according to different logics and methods. Among other effort, two European projects have been developed to provide support on this topic:

The European project HArmonised environmental Indicators for pesticide Risk (HAIR) provided an overview and conceptual framework for such indicators. The project provides tools for the calculation of the indicators at different scales. The results from the initial project has been updated to build a new, user friendly version of the instrument with a restricted set of robust and well documented risk indicators.
Moreover, the FOOTPRINT project has been developing tools for the analysis of pesticide impact in Europe from field to national and continental scale.

Risk indicators presented in HAIR are in the form of exposure/toxicity ratios, i.e. a comparison of environmental concentrations of pesticides with threshold values implying potential risks. The HAIR project suggests also a framework for the integration of the different indicators, which needs to be performed in relation to a specific question (e.g. what is the trend of risks associated with the consumption of a specific crop?). The analysis tools provided by the two projects allow a representation of risks from a given spatial and temporal distribution of pesticide usages.

The indicator of pesticide risk proposed here refers to aquatic and soil ecological risk, and builds on the concepts developed in the HAIR and FOOTPRINT projects. It aims at providing a synthetic representation of pesticide risk in Europe using the limited information available; it is computed as a weighted sum of exposure-toxicity ratios for all chemical classes used in Europe, under conservative assumptions. The approach can be extended to human health risk as well as other endpoints, in a straightforward way.

Policy relevance and context

The relevant policies are described in the ChapterPolicy relevance and context in AEI 6 Consumption of pesticides.

In an effort to harmonise the calculation of predicted environmental concentrations (PEC) of active substances of PPPs in the framework of EU Directive 0414/1991, the European Commission initiated FOCUS, FOrum for the Co-ordination of pesticide fate models and their Use. FOCUS is based on co-operation between scientists of regulatory agencies, academia and industry. FOCUS has produced guidance for calculating pesticide leaching to groundwater (FOCUS; 1995, 2000), for pesticide persistence in soil (FOCUS, 1996); and for pesticide loss to surface water (FOCUS, 1997).
The European Directive on Drinking Water 80/778/EEC (amended by Directive 98/83/EC) sets the maximum allowable concentrations for pesticides in water for human consumption to 0.1 µg/l for individual substances and for total amount of pesticides and their residues to 0.5 µg/l. This standard of 0.1 µg/l has consequently been proposed by the Commission in the proposal for a new Directive on groundwater. No legislation exists about the PPP concentration in soil. However, Annex VI of Council Directive 91/414/EEC prohibits the placing on the market of an active substance if it persists in the field for more than one year (i.e. DT90 > 1 year and DT50 > 3 months) or forms in laboratory tests non-extractable residues in amounts exceeding 70 % of the initial dose after 100 days with a mineralisation rate of less than 5 % in 100 days, unless it is scientifically proven that there is no accumulation in the soil that might harm the environment or the succeeding crops.
In addition several Directives set Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) for food and feedstuffs. The Directives fix the MRLs for commodity/PPP combinations based on good agricultural practices taking into account the acceptable daily intake. These are: Council Directive 76/895/EEC on the fixing of Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) on selected fruit and vegetables, Council Directives 86/362/EEC and 86/363/EEC on the fixing of MRLs on cereals and foodstuffs of animal origin, respectively and Council Directive 90/642/EEC on the fixing of MRLs in certain products of plant origin.” (IRENA indicator #20 fact sheet, 2005).
Moreover, within the existing legal framework for the authorization of pesticides, EFSA provides technical support to the Commission in evaluating risks related to pesticides and their residues in food.
A new legislative framework on pesticides based on the Commission proposal has recently been adopted by the European Parliament and the Council. This includes a Directive on the sustainable use of pesticides (2009/128/EC), which aims at reducing the risk linked to the use of pesticides, improving the quality and efficacy of pesticide application equipment, ensuring better training and education of users and developing integrated pest management schemes. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:309:0071:0086:EN:PDF) It pursues the reduction of pesticide risk through specific actions including the implementation of national plans. In this context, indicators of risk are key to define the present conditions and to mark the progress towards the goals of the directive.
Furthermore, article 11.3.h of the Water Framework directive foresees that each river basin district includes obligatory measure to tackle diffuse sources liable to cause pollution. This addresses the application of pesticides.
Agri-environmental Context
Pesticides use in Europe has been steadily increasing. Although chemical substances placed on the market tend to be less and less harmful in response to the requirements of the directives and regulations in force, as they undergo more and more risk assessment, still pesticides represent one of the main pressures from agriculture on human health and ecosystems. Plant protection products are used extensively on all European agricultural land in all environmental contexts. For example, chlordecone has been used in the French island of Martinique on banana plantations until 2003 and heavily contaminated soil. Chlordecone persists in the environment, with a half-life of about 30 years. The persistence of pesticides in the environment tends to be reduced thanks to the gradual replacement of “old” chemicals, such as Lindane (or more recently Endosulfan and Trifluralin), with equivalents producing lesser impacts. However, to date no homogeneous and extensive assessment of risk conditions in Europe has been conducted.
The pesticide statistics regulation (1185/2009) has identified close to 500 active substances to be followed; usage data are reported for Europe grouped in almost 120 substance classes, some of which include a high number of chemicals with markedly different physico-chemical properties, hence fate and toxicity to humans and ecosystems. The environmental concentration of pesticides depends substantially on application timing and mode, climate and landscape parameters. Among other parameters, soil organic carbon content, the distance of the application site from water bodies, the presence of buffer vegetation, ambient temperature, and runoff and leaching rates play a major role.
The effects of pesticides on ecosystems have been characterized using toxicological properties of the chemicals for indicator species (fish, algae, aquatic invertebrates for water; bees and earthworms for terrestrial ecosystems; sometimes toxicity data for birds and mammals are also available). Also, a clear relationship has been highlighted between ecological structures and toxicity of water to Daphnia Magna (Liess and von der Ohe, 2005).
Ecosystems may be significantly impacted by pesticides; however, impacts can be significantly reduced when landscape patterns support habitats that can provide recolonization. Recent research has highlighted that, for instance, the presence of forest in the catchment upstream of a river impacted by pesticides correlates to increased resilience of aquatic communities (see e.g. Liess and von der Ohe, 2005).
Further Eurostat information

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Notes

[[Category:<Subtheme category name(s)>|Statistical article]] [[Category:<Statistical article>|Statistical article]]