(AGENPARL) – gio 25 luglio 2024 Issued: Jul 25, 2024 (2:18pm EDT)
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EPA Releases Draft Strategy to Better Protect Endangered Species from
Insecticides
WASHINGTON – Today, July 25, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
released its draft Insecticide Strategy for public comment, another milestone
in the agency’s work to adopt early, practical protections for federally
endangered and threatened (listed) species. The draft strategy identifies
protections that EPA will consider when it registers a new insecticide or
reevaluates an existing one. In developing this draft strategy, EPA identified
protections to address potential impacts for more than 850 species listed by
the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS).
“Ensuring the safe use of insecticides is a critical part of EPA’s mission
to protect endangered species and the environment,” said Deputy Assistant
Administrator for Pesticide Programs for the Office of Chemical Safety and
Pollution Prevention Jake Li. “This draft strategy is another major step in
the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to protect endangered species,
support farmers and other insecticide users, and provide critical
environmental protections for communities across the country.”
Today’s draft is part of EPA’s ongoing efforts to develop a more
efficient, effective, and protective multichemical, multispecies approach to
meeting its obligations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). EPA focused
the draft strategy on conventional insecticides used in agriculture in the
lower 48 states, where approximately 34 million pounds of insecticides are
applied each year. The draft identifies protections earlier in the pesticide
review process, thus creating a far more efficient approach to evaluate and
protect the FWS-listed species that live near these agricultural areas.
This draft strategy also incorporates lessons learned from EPA’s draft
herbicide strategy that the agency released last year to minimize the impacts
of agricultural herbicides on listed species. For example, based on feedback
on the draft herbicide strategy, EPA designed the mitigations in the draft
insecticide strategy to maximize the number of options for farmers and other
pesticide users. These mitigation options also consider farmers who are
already implementing measures to reduce pesticide runoff and those who are
located in areas less prone to pesticide runoff, such as flat lands and
regions with less rain to carry pesticides off fields. These measures also
include the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation
Service practices and state or private stewardship measures that are effective
at reducing pesticide runoff.
Similar to the herbicide strategy, the draft insecticide strategy uses the
most updated information and processes to determine whether an insecticide
will impact a listed species and identify protections to address any impacts.
To determine impacts, the draft strategy considers where a species lives, what
it needs to reproduce (e.g., food or pollinators), where the pesticide will
end up in the environment, and what kind of impacts the pesticide might have
if it reaches the species. These refinements greatly reduce the need for
pesticide restrictions in situations that do not benefit species.
Once final, the insecticide strategy will expedite future ESA consultations
with FWS. In the draft strategy, EPA identified mitigations to address the
potential impacts of insecticides on listed species even before EPA completes
the ESA consultation process—which in many cases, can take five years or
more. Further, once EPA finalizes the Insecticide Strategy, the agency and FWS
expect to formalize their understanding of how this strategy can inform and
streamline future ESA consultations for insecticides. Through a separate
initiative, EPA is addressing potential impacts of insecticides to listed
species and critical habitats protected by the National Marine Fisheries
Service.
EPA’s decades-long approach of trying to meet these obligations
chemical-by-chemical and species-by-species is slow and costly, resulting in
litigation against the agency and uncertainty for farmers and other pesticide
users about the continued availability of many pesticides. At the beginning of
2021, EPA faced nearly 20 lawsuits covering thousands of pesticide products
due to its longstanding failure to meet ESA obligations for pesticides. Now,
all of those lawsuits have been resolved as a result of the Biden-Harris
Administration’s new approaches for protecting endangered species, which
include this draft strategy.
The draft Insecticide Strategy Framework and accompanying support documents
are available in docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2024-0299 for public comment for 60 days.
Visit EPA’s website to learn more about how EPA’s pesticide program is
protecting endangered species.
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