5-Point programme for sustainable plant protection.

This position paper intends to stimulate a profound rethinking of contemporary agricultural practice. We criticise the current intensity of chemical plant protection in Germany as ecologically unsustainable and thus threatening the achievement of key targets of environmental protection and nature conservation policies. In the first part of the paper, we provide background information on the use of plant protection products (PPP) in German agriculture, the role of agricultural policy, European pesticide legislation, the principles of and framework for environmental risk assessment and risk management of PPP, as well as environmental effects of PPP.

Geodata-based probabilistic risk assessment and management of pesticides in Germany: a conceptual framework.

The procedure for the risk assessment of pesticides in Germany is currently further developed from a deterministic to a geodata-based probabilistic risk assessment (GeoPRA) approach. As the initial step, the exposure assessment for spray drift in permanent crops, such as vineyards, fruit orchards, and hops, is considered. In our concept, geoinformation tools are used to predict distribution functions for exposure concentrations based mainly on spatial information regarding the neighbourhood of crops and surface waters.