Around the world, the total toxicity and ecological harm from agricultural pesticides are rising, despite recent United Nations commitments to halve pesticide use and risks by 2030. The findings establish a global, toxicity-weighted baseline for pesticide use and identify a subset of pesticides, crops, and countries driving the most biodiversity impacts. The widespread use of agricultural pesticides is a growing threat to global biodiversity. To address this concern, the 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference set the goal of halving pesticide use and risk by 2030 and recently adopted a new global indicator – total applied toxicity (TAT) – that captures not just how much pesticide is used, but how harmful different chemicals are to living organisms. However, pesticide toxicity varies widely across non-target species; earlier global studies have focused on limited types of pesticides or species or have relied only on usage amounts. They have typically overlooked major differences in toxicity. As a result, the true range of pesticide threats to biodiversity, and the progress made toward UN commitments, remain obscure.
Using the TAT approach, Jakob Wolfram and colleagues developed a globally consistent way to measure the ecological harm of pesticides. Instead of relying on standards from a single country, Wolfram et al. used average regulatory safety thresholds per species group and pesticide derived from seven major regulatory authorities worldwide to ensure that the results reflect global conditions. By weighting total pesticide use with these toxicity benchmarks, the authors created a single comprehensive indicator that captures risks of 625 pesticides for a wide range of species. The findings show that the overall ecological toxicity of pesticides is rising worldwide, with increasing trends observed across many countries, crops, and groups of species. Overall, TAT is dominated by only a small number of highly toxic chemicals, with fruits and vegetables, corn, soybean, cereals, and rice accounting for 76-83% of global pesticide toxicity. Moreover, China, Brazil, the United States, and India together contribute 53-68% to the global TAT. According to Wolfram et al., the findings demonstrate that most countries are not on track to meet UN pesticide reduction targets without substantial changes.
