Advancing environmental risk assessment for bees and other insect pollinators

09.00 -10.45 CEST

Around 170 people joined a session at this year’s EU Pollinator Week organised jointly by EFSA and the European Chemicals Agency. The session, titled Advancing environmental risk assessment to better protect insect pollinators (video recording available here), was part of a four-day event hosted by the European Parliament, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment (DG ENV) and the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. 

Pollinator Week brings together stakeholders from all fields related to bees, pollinators and biodiversity. MEPs, representatives of the EU institutions, beekeepers, farmers, scientists, veterinarians, manufacturers, NGOs and citizens gather to discuss the current challenges and formulate recommendations for policy makers.

Speakers at the EFSA/ECHA session provided an update on bee health-related work at the two agencies. Agnès Rortais, a senior scientific officer at EFSA, outlined the agency’s MUST-B opinion, which was triggered by a mandate from the European Parliament, and explained how EFSA is broadening the scope of its work on environmental risk assessment to include wild bees and other insect pollinators.

She called for a “paradigm shift” in environmental risk assessment to address combined stressors – biological, chemical, and factors such as climate change and agricultural practices – and for risk assessors and managers to adopt a holistic approach to the issue. 

Dr Rortais added that over the coming years EFSA aimed to modernise the environmental risk assessment of chemicals for insect pollinators in collaboration with the European Commission, EU agencies and Member States. This work will support the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy and Pollinators Initiative.

Another EFSA scientist, Alessio Ippolito, gave an update of the ongoing review of the guidance on pesticides and bees. Among other things, he emphasised that the information collected for the review had enabled better estimates of bee food consumption; of sugar content in nectar; of bee background mortality; and of pesticide residues in pollen and nectar. The consideration given to wild bees in the review was also much improved, he said.

Noa Simón Delso, Scientific Director of BeeLife European Beekeeping Coordination, presented the EU Bee Partnership Prototype Platform for collecting and sharing bee health data, which was launched this year. She explained that there is an enormous amount of data on bee and pollinator health, but it is fragmented and often inaccessible.

The platform aims to address these deficiencies by centralising, standardising, processing and analysing data in a secure environment in which the intellectual property of everybody is respected.

Simón Gutiérrez Alonso, an ecotoxicologist at ECHA, completed the presentations by giving an overview and status update on the development of ECHA’s guidance document assessing the risks to arthropod pollinators (including bees) from the use of biocides.

The chair of the session, Jutta Paulus MEP, thanked the participants and said she was impressed by the work being carried out. She emphasised that it is clear more research is needed – “The list of knowledge gaps is longer than the list of what we know” – as well as more involvement from citizens.

All the presentations were followed by 10-minute Q&A sessions. Questions that were not answered live will be addressed in a document to be published on the EFSA website.

Please contact the organising committee at online.events [at] efsa.europa.eu (online[dot]events[at]efsa[dot]europa[dot]eu) for more information.