Pesticide Residues in the Ecosystem and Humans Across Europe: Linking SPRINT Field Data to Health Risks
The SPRINT projects (sprint-h2020.eu) is related to the target of the European Farm to Fork Strategy: a 50% reduction in chemical pesticide use and risk by 50% by 2030. SPRINT addresses the urgent need to assess the actual presence of pesticide residues in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, indoor dust and human matrices across Europe, covering the main cropping systems. Furthermore, we address the risk of pesticide mixtures for ecosystem and human health.
SPRINT is the first European wide effort to monitor real pesticide application patterns (Mark et al. 2023) and the resulting distribution of pesticide residues across all main European cropping systems. Therefore, we monitored during the growing season of 2021 in 10 European case study sites. We took about 600 samples across environmental matrices – soil, plant, surface water, sediment, air and indoor dust and blood, urine and feces samples from 670 persons.
We assess residue distribution connected to different farming systems (organic, integrated), taking the fact into consideration that synthetic pesticides are not applied in organic farming systems, but that they may be still present due to applications in the past or by deposition due to off-site transport.
SPRINT focuses on more than 200 active substances of synthetic pesticides and their metabolites from group 2 (approved), group 3 (candidates of substitution) and group 4 (banned at EU level) as categorized by the EC (2020).
We link the residue distribution in the different matrices to the hazardous properties of the residues (EFSA conclusions, PPDB database) for ecosystem and human health and introduce a Risk Indicator as a base for the 50% risk reduction target of the Farm to Fork strategy.
Based on field results we test the mixtures’ impact on the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem conducting innovative ecotoxicological tests with sensitive indicators. Furthermore, we assess human health effects conducting in vitro tests with colon ilium and long organoids.
The SPRINT session provides highly important knowledge needed to solve the urgent questions on how to reduce pesticide risk as a base for a transition to sustainable agriculture. We provide data and a new risk indicator that can be included in new regulations.