Establishing the representativeness of available surface water scenarios for pesticide risk assessment in Norway

The Norwegian Food Safety Authority (NFSA) requires this knowledgebase as part of a review and eventual upgrade of the current risk assessment methodology.

The mandate

The NFSA asks VKM to assess the following objectives:

1. To identify agricultural areas in Norway that are «represented» by soil and climate conditions in the ten FOCUS surface water standard scenarios or the four nationalscenarios, andquantify the size and spatial distribution of these areas.
2. To determine how worst-case the areas identified in objective 1 are in terms of surface water exposure potential compared to agricultural land across Norway, and if they could be considered protective of additional areas, even if they are not directly representative.
3. To identify the characteristics and spatial distribution of all agricultural land in Norway that is not represented by any of the ten FOCUS surface water scenarios or the four national scenarios.
4. To assess the relative importance of surface run-off (both dissolved and particulate phases),drainflowand spray drift as routes of aquatic exposure to pesticides in Norway based on pedoclimatic characteristics.

The project group

Ole Martin Eklo – member of the VKM Panel on plant protection products (chair)

Tor Fredrik Holth - member of the VKM Panel on plant protection products

Michael Klein – external expert from Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME, Germany

Nana Yaa Boahene – Project manager, VKM-secretariat

The Panel on plant protection products is responsible for the assessment. The report is expected to be published in January 2021.