Amy Brooks will be co-chairing a session at SETAC Dublin next year on the topic of ‘Soil risk assessment: future challenges for exposure and effects assessments – how to refine risks in intermediate risks?’

Other co-chairs will be Gregor Ernst (Bayer CropScience, industry), Kees van Gestel (University of Amsterdam, academia), and Claire Anderson (HSE CRD, regulator).

The session outline can be found below:

Soil health must be protected for a healthy environment and food and fibre production. Risks to soil organisms from pesticides are assessed in Europe under the regulation EC 1107/2009. The relevant guidance (SANCO/10329/2002) doesn’t encompass the full array of requirements for conducting a risk assessment for soil organisms e.g. specific protection goals, tiered assessment schemes and pesticide effect evaluation in the field or by using modelling approaches.

In 2017, a scientific opinion was published by EFSA outlining the state of the science on soil risk assessment. A new EFSA guidance document for predicting environmental concentrations of pesticide active substances and their transformation products in soil was also published. The associated effects guidance is under development.

One outcome is a new PECsoil calculator tool, PERSAM (PERsistence in Soil Analytical Model), and updates to PEARL and PELMO to support higher tier exposure assessments. The new soil exposure assessment scheme (comprising 4 tiers) generally appears to be more conservative than the current methodology for PECsoil calculation, leading to an increased soil risk assessment failure rate (Schimera et al. 2022). The soil characteristics used differ from those in effect studies, and questions remain regarding their use in a tiered soil risk assessment approach.

It is foreseeable that more substances will require higher-tier refinement approaches to demonstrate low risks to soil organisms. The options available for refinement are currently limited, with the main option being field studies, which will increase in complexity on various levels (Römbke et al. 2020).

In this session we encourage presentations that provide further options for refining soil risk assessments, either from an exposure and/or effects perspective, using experimental, modelling or other desk-based approaches. Presentations should include the refinement option and how it can be implemented in a tiered risk assessment, including consideration of factors such as endpoint selection and assessment factors (where appropriate). We also welcome case studies with real world data, allowing a calibration of theoretical estimates and ecological relevance.

We aim to focus on the alignment of effect and exposure frameworks to enable a scientific sound risk assessment and evaluation of pesticides.

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