| This project will support Community policies for sustainable agriculture by providing a har-monised European approach for indicators of the overall risk of pesticides. It will integrate European scientific expertise on the use, emissions and environmental fate of pesticides and their impact on agro-ecosystems and human health, in order to learn and understand the limi-tations of existing approaches and develop improved indicators. The main deliverable of the project is a set of harmonised environmental and human health risk indicators, implemented in an easy to use software package. The proposed tool will in-clude methods to predict environmental fate and exposure, and the resulting acute and chronic risks for aquatic and terrestrial organisms, for groundwater, for public health (including preg-nant women) and for applicators of the pesticides. Consistent database structures will be de-veloped for soil, climate, land use, agricultural practice, pesticide use and ecotoxicological data, to enable the harmonised use of the indicators at the distinguished scales. State-of-the-art methods will be used to extrapolate from test animals to humans and wildlife, and the indica-tors will include chronic risks based on sub-lethal effects as well as acute risks. The project will use existing data sets to systematically evaluate the validation status of the indicators, in-cluding information gathered by regional and national organisations. The indicator outputs will be available on different scales, providing high resolution results at the catchment/regional level, taking account of local conditions of soil, climate etc; and also aggregated and integrated results at the European level. The indicators will provide new and powerful assessment tools for monitoring and managing the overall risks of pesticides. This will contribute directly to Agenda 2000 aims for sustain-able agriculture, and to the 6th Environment Action Programme s Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Plant Protection Products. |
