3 public consultations on overarching elements of Environmental Risk Assessment

Guidance on protection goals(2.23 MB) 

Opinion on endangered species(3.17 MB) 

Opinion on recovery(3.09 MB) 

Privacy statement(159.39 KB)  

EFSA has launched open consultations on three draft scientific documents on Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) for potential stressors (e.g. plant protection products, genetically modified organisms, invasive plant pests, feed additives) that fall under the remit of EFSA.

The first document is a guidance document that will help increase harmonisation between different applications of ERA.

• Draft guidance Document to define protection goals for environmental risk assessment in relation to biodiversity and ecosystem services. This draft document presents a framework which accounts for biodiversity and ecosystem services, to make policy protection goals operational for use in EFSA’s ERA.

The other two opinions are in effect position papers, outlining the state of the art and as such provide a useful sounding board to help with stakeholder engagement on these subjects. This will help EFSA gathering input in preparation for refining existing ERA schemes at some point in the future.

• Draft opinion on coverage of endangered species in environmental risk assessments at EFSA. The present draft opinion reviews the characteristics that determine vulnerability of endangered species and reviews whether or not endangered species can suffer more than non-endangered species from assessed potential stressors in an agricultural context. It is not the intention of this opinion to indicate where, when or for how long endangered species have to be protected.
• Draft opinion on the temporal and spatial ecological recovery of non-target organisms for environmental risk assessments. This draft opinion presents an integrative approach based on well-defined specific protection goals, scientific knowledge derived by means of experimentation, modelling and monitoring, and the selection of focal taxa, communities, processes and landscapes to develop environmental scenarios to allow the assessment of recovery of organisms and ecological processes at relevant spatial and temporal scales.

In line with EFSA’s policy on openness and transparency and in order for EFSA to receive comments from the scientific community and stakeholders, EFSA has launched public consultations on these draft documents developed by the Scientific Committee of EFSA.

Interested parties are invited to submit written comments by 10 September 2015. Please use the online tools to submit comments and refer to the line and page numbers of the respective document:

A generic comments field is available in each of these online tools. Please note that after 2 hours non-activity, your working session will expire and comments submitted after that time will not be recorded and transmitted. Therefore, if the page is left inactive for a while, before restart commenting, we advise you to refresh or re-open the page from the link.

Please note that comments will not be considered if they:

• are submitted after the closing date of the public consultation;
• are not related to the contents of the document;
• contain complaints against institutions, personal accusations, irrelevant or offensive statements or material;
• are related to policy or risk management aspects, which are out of the scope of EFSA's activity. 

EFSA will assess all comments from interested parties which are submitted in line with the criteria above. The comments will be further considered by the Scientific Committee and taken into consideration if found to be relevant.

All comments submitted will be published. Comments submitted by individuals in a personal capacity will be presented anonymously. Comments submitted formally on behalf of an organisation will appear with the name of the organisation.

If you would like to submit data-sets to support your comments, or submit files; send an email to SCER.PublicConsultPG.53 [at] efsa.europa.eu (SCER[dot]PublicConsultPG[dot]53[at]efsa[dot]europa[dot]eu) for protection goals or SCER.PublicConsultES.52 [at] efsa.europa.eu (SCER[dot]PublicConsultES[dot]52[at]efsa[dot]europa[dot]eu) for endangered species, or SCER.PublicConsultREC.54 [at] efsa.europa.eu (SCER[dot]PublicConsultREC[dot]54[at]efsa[dot]europa[dot]eu) for recovery