Policy resources

This policy brief examines how practitioners across 25 European countries perceive the EU’s environmental risk assessment (ERA) system for plant protection products, drawing on a survey of 114 practitioners and follow-up workshops organised through PARC in collaboration with PollinERA and SYBERAC. It finds that, despite a well-established regulatory framework, complexity, fragmented data and limited cross-country collaboration hinder efficiency and ecological realism, and recommends clearer protection goals, stronger collaboration and more proportionate, problem-driven assessments.

The white paper, jointly developed by eight Horizon Europe-funded projects, examines how inconsistent and conflicting EU policies across agriculture, chemicals, trade, environmental protection and other sectors hinder pollinator conservation and restoration. It proposes 15 recommendations to integrate pollinator protection into all relevant policy areas, including stronger monitoring, reduced pesticide exposure, habitat restoration, cross-sector collaboration and evidence-based policymaking.

This policy brief calls for a major shift in EU pesticide regulation, arguing that current assessments of individual substances fail to address the cumulative environmental impacts of pesticide use across landscapes, and that many pesticide bans are unnecessary if the scale of use is managed.

A technical support document for the PollinERA Policy brief “A Regional Budget System for Pesticide Management: Systems-first environmental risk assessment: the case for change"

This brief was developed to address one of the core challenges identified in the project: The need to improve the way environmental risks to pollinators are currently assessed. The current approach works in isolation, overlooks cumulative impacts and bases decisions solely on binary “safe/unsafe” categories. This brief suggests a systems-first, tools-second approach that can deliver faster, cheaper and effective decision making by prioritising simulation and systems understanding before developing regulatory tools for Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA).

A technical support document for the PollinERA Policy brief “Reforming EU chemical risk assessment: from regulatory bottlenecks to systems solution