Environmental risk assessment for pesticides through practitioners’ eyes: Does it reflect ecological realities?

Thoroughly assessing the environmental risks of plant protection products is crucial given their potential for impact on biodiversity, especially pollinator populations. That is why environmental risk assessment (ERA) procedures for every plant protection product (PPP) in the European Union (EU) matter so much. But how do the professionals conducting these assessments perceive the system they work with?

There are growing concerns about the ability of current ERA procedures to account for environmental complexity, as well as the efficiency of the regulatory process itself. To better understand how the regulatory system operates in practice and where improvements may be needed, the PollinERA, PARC and SYBERAC projects conducted a survey among practitioners across Europe in 2024, complemented by targeted follow-up workshops. The findings are presented in the new policy brief ‘Practitioners’ perspectives on EU environmental risk assessment for plant protection products’, published in Environmental Sciences Europe. The publication also outlines recommendations to address the challenges practitioners identified. 

The survey included 114 practitioners, predominantly regulatory risk assessors, from 31 regulatory organisations across 25 European countries. Their answers show that although they find the current ERA effective in meeting formal regulatory requirements, they are less confident in its ability to predict environmental impacts under real-world conditions. Among the main challenges they identified were procedural complexity, the interpretative demands of guidance, fragmented data systems, limited opportunities to reuse information across dossiers and increasing workloads. Together, these challenges raise a broader question: does adding more requirements and complexity necessarily improve an assessment's environmental relevance, or can it divert resources from the questions that matter most for environmental protection?

Importantly, these concerns come from professionals working within the regulatory system itself. Workshop discussions highlighted challenges beyond the efficiency of individual assessments, pointing to limitations in the system’s ability to learn from accumulated knowledge and address environmental risks in a more integrated way. Participants raised questions about how current approaches account for factors such as combined exposures, longer-term effects and wider environmental conditions, and how assessment procedures could better support informed regulatory decision-making.

Recommendations

The policy brief's concrete recommendations include clearer ERA objectives and operational protection goals, stronger cross-organisational collaboration (especially across organisations and Member States) and more proportionate, problem-driven assessment approaches. This includes expanding ERA beyond single-substance assessments to focus on mixtures, combined exposures, the surrounding environment and indirect or long-term effects when they matter for decision-making. Together, these changes could improve ERA's ecological efficiency and regulatory credibility while providing a safer environment for pollinators. 

Read the full publication here.