1. Executive summary

    
A stable and reliable food supply in Europe has over recent decades become normal. This has been achieved in many cases by the use of pesticides to control pests, weeds, and diseases, plus fertilisers to supply additional nutrients. Pesticides play an essential role in the food production process, maintaining or enhancing crop yields in conventional arable farming. However, they can also lead to harmful effects in the environment, including aquatic ecosystems and risks to human health. There is now widespread concern about the addition of a substance to the environment designed to be toxic to some part of the ecosystem.

European policies aimed at reducing the potential risk from pesticides mainly lie under the Plants Protection Products Regulation (EC, 2009b), the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive (EU, 2009) and the Biocidal Products Regulation (EU, 2012). The Water Framework Directive (WFD) (EC 2000) and its daughter directives add legislation to protect water quality. There is however, little evidence to show whether this legislation has been effective, mainly because of a lack of data to demonstrate the actual risk of pesticides in surface waters and groundwater at the European level (EEA, 2018a). Addressing this gap is of high interest for policy, practitioners, and the public owing to potential risks pesticides present to both the environment and public health.

This technical report provides an overview of the information available on pesticide concentrations in surface and groundwaters in EEA countries.

EEA’s Waterbase – Water Quality database contains the most reliable data available from across Europe. For the assessment, 180 pesticide substances were selected and characterised according to their usage, their Mode of Action (MoA), their chemical grouping, and their environmental quality standards (EQS) under consideration of the reported analytical limits of quantification (LOQ). The methods for the quality assurance of data, selection criteria and extraction, as well as the assignment of targets and calculation of exceedance rates under consideration of LOQ resulted in a unique database, and can be seen as a starting point on how to assess pesticide risk in surface waters and groundwater in Europe. EQS are based on European standards where available, and then on national EQS values (using the lowest value as a precautionary approach).  The data suggest that for the period 2013 – 2017 for surface waters, 5 – 15 % of monitoring stations could be affected by herbicides and 3 – 8 % by insecticides. For groundwater the shares are about 7 % for herbicides and below 1 % for insecticides. Fungicides seem to be of lower importance.

This analysis contrasts with the results of status assessment of the 2nd River Basin Management plan 2016 under the WFD, which show 0.5% of all surface water bodies failing good chemical status because of pesticides, and 15% of groundwater bodies (EEA 2018).

The report also lists a number of other data sources for pesticides, especially scientific research and emissons data. They are diverse and often have limited spatial coverage, which make such data less representative for a European status assessment.

The aim of this work is to provide a baseline for what we know of measured concentrations of pesticides in water at the European level.