The 11-member PollinERA project consortium, brought together to reverse pollinator population declines and reduce the harmful impacts of pesticides, has released its first policy brief.
This marks an important stepping stone for the project, bringing PollinERA’s scientific insights directly into the policy space in a format designed to support decision-making.
Titled “Reforming EU chemical risk assessment: from regulatory bottlenecks to systems solution”, the 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.
It has been acknowledged that the current approach works in isolation, overlooks cumulative impacts and bases decisions solely on binary “safe/unsafe” categories.
What the PollinERA-derived policy brief suggests is 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).
The brief is authored by project coordinator Christopher John Topping, Noa Simon Delso, James Henty Williams and Johan Axelman. Together, the team used their expertise in pollinator research and environmental policy to present PollinERA findings in an accessible, practical and relevant way, dedicated for those who shape policy at European and national levels.
To ensure transparency and provide a strong scientific foundation, the policy brief is supported by a technical evidence report, also made openly available.
The policy brief, technical supportive documents, as well as key scientific resources and publications are conveniently and publicly accessible in the PollinERA’s project collection, hosted in the open-science scholarly journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO). Being ‘a living’ space, the collection will be further enriched as new valuable outputs are generated over the course of the project.
Additionally, research articles associated with the project are being added to the PollinERA collection in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal (FESMJ), titled “PollinERA – Understanding pesticide-Pollinator interactions to support EU Environmental Risk Assessment and policy“.
The policy brief marks the beginning of the PollinERA Policy series: a collection of policy briefs that will be released throughout the project.
Each brief will focus on a different aspect of pollinator protection or pesticide risk assessment, helping to build a coherent and comprehensive set of policy-facing outputs.