On July 22, 2024, the National and Regional Weed Science Societies were among 318 stakeholders who wrote a letter to EPA to share our concerns and seek a dialogue with EPA on ways to improve its process for assessing potential risks that pesticides may pose to endangered species and their critical habitats.
Dear Assistant Administrator Li,
As stakeholder groups representing farmers, retailers, co-ops, crop consultants, academics, manufacturers, and state regulators, among others, we write to share our concerns and seek a dialogue with EPA on ways to improve its process for assessing potential risks that pesticides may pose to endangered species and their critical habitats. The current methods EPA uses to assess these risks are exceedingly conservative, often relying on unrefined models and very conservative assumptions in lieu of considering available relevant and reliable scientific and commercial data. As a result, these assessments can significantly overstate risks to species, concluding that pesticide users must adopt more costly, stringent restrictions than are truly necessary to protect listed species. We appreciate EPA has recently signaled its openness to discussing the Endangered Species Act (ESA) risk assessment process with stakeholders. We encourage the Agency to begin these discussions as soon as possible—by no later than September 2024—to ensure any resulting risk assessment improvements are timely adopted, thereby helping to avoid or minimize the implementation of use restrictions where they are not necessary.
In several recent ESA-related pesticide proposals, such as the draft Herbicide Strategy and Vulnerable Species Pilot, EPA has indicated it is using less refined Tier I models to predict estimated environmental concentrations (EECs) of pesticides and exposure risks to listed species and their critical habitats. The Agency often does not incorporate various available sources of real-world data that could help to better inform the exposure and effects assessments. These sources include, for example, data on pesticide usage; percent of an area cropped; percent of crop area treated; existing conservation practices that may have a protective effect for species; geospatial data; precision agriculture risk reduction benefits; more taxonomically appropriate surrogate species; and more comprehensive species sensitivity distribution, among others.