Advancing Options for Management and Mitigation of
Spray Drift
Risk Mitigation Measures in Europe to Prevent Plant Protection Product losses to the Environment
SETAC MAgPIE workshop
The identification of risk mitigation measures, aiming at lowering the risks that plant protection products or pesticides, may pose to the environment is a pre-requisite to their registration and as such part of the European Regulation on the placing of pesticide products on the market. Risk mitigation measures correspond to an ensemble of measures and tools that reduce the transfer of the product into a particular environmental compartment and thus mitigate the exposure of organisms and ecosystems. Risk managers in European countries expressed the needs to share knowledge and experience on the risk mitigation tools already in use in neighbouring countries, and this 2-part workshop was organised under the auspices of SETAC and European Commission to address this need.
The workshop gathered 95 experts from 24 European countries, to examine an inventory of the risk mitigation measures implemented in these countries, and build the foundation of a European-scale toolbox that would gather the most reliable options available to risk managers. The criteria used to select these measures were i) the effectiveness of a tool to mitigate risks, as supported by scientific data, ii) the practicality of this tool to farmers, iii) the easiness of implementation of the tool by risk managers, in their national regulations or as “good agricultural practices” to propose to farmers, and iv) the possibility to take the measure into account in the regulatory risk assessment.
Dedicated technical recommendation sheet, describing a measure, its benefits and implementation practicalities at the agricultural level, were prepared for each of the measures of the toolbox, and are included in these proceedings.
Options to further refine and expand the toolbox in the future were also discussed, so that it keeps reflecting technical progress and stimulates innovation in the area of pesticide application and agricultural practice.
Finally, these proceedings contain a proposal for revised phrasing options that usually accompany risk mitigation measures on product labelling, reflecting the range of options available to farmers to secure pesticide application.
Proceedings can be downloaded for free as an e-book at: