Enviresearch Consultants Publish New Paper

Enviresearch's James Garratt and Sabine Beulke have collaborated with Thomas Dowling, of King’s College London to publish a new paper. The paper discusses the spatial assessment of pesticide leaching risk to groundwater: sub‐national decision making and model output aggregation.

'This is the data age. We started this work because we felt that the way we assess pesticide risk to ground water was not keeping pace with our understanding of the world. The normal way to assess a risk is to provide a few predictions of pesticide concentrations in a few sites. If any of them are too high then the pesticide is considered ‘unsafe’ and the authorities may reject it for a whole country. We were trying to find a way to for authorities to say ‘You can’t use it everywhere, but it will be safe enough in some places.’

It is a tricky problem. We have good knowledge of the environment, but not perfect. We have good models to calculate concentrations, but not perfect. We need to make some judgement calls on what areas are manageable for restricting pesticide use. Overall, we believe that we found a rational and reasonable solution that would allow our regulators to make smarter approvals and smarter restrictions on pesticide use. Essentially, we could allow use where it has been shown to be safe, even if that is not the whole country.' James Garratt, MD.

References:

Thomas PF Dowling: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/dr-thomas-dowling

James Garratt:https://www.enviresearch.com/regulatory-risk-assessment-service/our-team/james-garratt

Sabine Beulke:https://www.enviresearch.com/regulatory-risk-assessment-service/our-team/sabine-beulke