CEA to co-chair SETAC session on bird and mammal risk assessment

Other co-chairs will be Manousos Foudoulakis (Corteva Agriscience), Christian Wolf (tier3 solutions), and Rachel Sharp (EFSA).

The session outline can be found below:

The Guidance Document (GD) on the risk assessment for birds and mammals (B&M) for pesticides (EFSA 2009) is now in the process of being officially updated by EFSA and will be finalised in 2022.

The purpose of the session proposed for SETAC EU 2023 is a follow-up of the session in the previous years (2019, 2020 & 2021) with a more targeted focus on higher tier support, challenges for the future, especially with the realisation of the targets of the EU Green Deal (e.g., precision farming in a regulatory context), and additional data needs and compilation procedure.

The documents published by EFSA on higher tier support suggest that criteria and methodology for conducting and interpreting higher tier approaches for risk refinement are not always agreed among the relevant expert community (regulators, industry, contract laboratories and academia) while the GD contains topics which remain controversial and/or lack harmonization in interpretation among regulators (e.g., modelling). Presentations on complex semi-field or field studies to improve study design, refine ecological parameters, modelling and their use in regulatory risk assessments are welcome.

The European Green Deal requires a reduction in pesticide use by 2030. Whilst such reduction will no doubt be beneficial to the environment, industry, regulators and consultancies need to be prepared to perform risk assessments and field studies accounting for modern techniques including targeted application and variable application rates.

Significant efforts have been carried out in the last years mainly focussed on the compilation of data to improve the exposure and toxicity/effects components of the risk assessment but still in few cases surrogate data are used e.g., seed residues.

The main objectives of this session would be (1) to give stakeholders the opportunity to share results from recent studies and present approaches to improve scientific quality and regulatory acceptance of the EFSA B&M GD update, (2) to discuss novel approaches for undertaking and presenting higher tier support, including for precision farming risk assessments schemes (3) to serve as a platform to develop further joint initiatives contributing to data development and compilation for inclusion in the current EFSA GD for B&M.

The chairs have all sound experience with the use and/or update of this GD and are representative of different stakeholders (industry, M Foudoulakis; regulators, R Sharp; consultants, A Brooks & C Wolf).

We encourage everyone who is active in the realms of bird and mammal risk assessment to submit abstracts. You can submit your abstracts on the SETAC website within the abstract submission portal.