Decryption
Article reserved for subscribers
Commissioned by three ministries, this study reviews the impact of plant protection products on biodiversity in France. All the environments are contaminated, sometimes for long periods of time.
Each year, between 55,000 and 70,000 tonnes of plant protection products (PPP), that is to say, pesticides such as herbicides or insecticides (including organic), are sold in France. Contamination of soils and waterways, decline of invertebrates, amphibians and birds: their impacts on biodiversity have been documented for many years. But never has a study of such magnitude identified the overall state of knowledge on the subject in France. It is now done. For two years, experts from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae) and the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer), assisted by 17 other organizations, have reviewed the state of existing knowledge. The study concerns the metropolitan territory and the Overseas Territories, which are home to “80% of French biodiversity”.
Ordered by three ministries, that of Energy Transition, Agriculture, and Research, a collective scientific expertise “on the impacts of these products on biodiversity and ecosystem services from their spreading area to the marine environment” of a thousand pages will be published this summer. The experts, who studied more than 4,000 references from the world’s scientific literature for this, published their first results on Thursday. “This is an up-to-date inventory of existing knowledge, it does not…