In the past 20 years, the use of pesticides in agricultural lands have been target of several European Union (EU) regulations. More recently, and in line with several EU sustainability goals, the use of pesticides has been targeted by relevant policy ambitions aiming to reduce their use and risk following health and environmental concerns. Nonetheless, the current knowledge on soil contamination by pesticides residues is limited, due to a lack of systematic soil monitoring studies addressing soil pollution, especially at EU scale.
To fulfil this knowledge gap, the EU Soil Observatory led a study targeting residues of active ingredients of pesticides used as crop protection products in soil samples collected from the 2018 LUCAS survey. This is the largest study providing a comprehensive characterization on the extent of residues of active ingredients from pesticides in the soils of the EU. This work establishes an initial EU baseline, and project a future assessment of the effectiveness of EU policies and regulations targeting pesticides use and soil pollution. Moreover, this study provides the first steps on the development of risk indicators for soil, allowing to present the first temporal assessment of pesticides in EU soils following a pilot study with samples from 2015 LUCAS survey.
This study highlights that pesticide residues in soils are widespread in the European agricultural land (74.5% sites), whereas most of the sites (57.1%) present mixtures of substances (two or more). Additionally, an indicator of the ecotoxicological impact for soil organisms was developed. This indicator compared the concentration of these substances with the no effect concentration (NOEC) for soil organisms, identifying areas at higher risk (1.7% sites). But also, allowed to estimate an increase in ecotoxicological risk when compared with a previous assessment (2015-2018). Finally, among the substances found was also possible to identify non-approved substances in soils (12%), concerning long-banned substances, and several active ingredients that, subsequent to the sampling campaign, the Commission decided not to renew their approval as active substances under Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009.
The current study brought by the EU Soil Observatory and LUCAS 2018 soil module provides a significant contribution to the status of current knowledge on soil pollution in the EU. The insights provided in this report may help identifying target policies in creating a toxic-free environment.
The study is fully described in https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/86566 and an overview is given below.
Spatial Coverage: EU + UK
Scale: NUTS 2 (Regional scale)
Time Reference: 2018
Format: .xlsx
Data available for 118 substances and 3473 sites.
Data Structure:
NUTS2_conc_EU - Average pesticide residue concentration (mg Kg-1) by NUTS2
NUTS2_count_EU - Number of samples considered for average calculation.
Label on substances analyzed - Chemical Name, CAS Number, LOQ (mg Kg-1).
Release Date: 25/02/2024
More information about the Pesticides residues in EU agricultural soils based on LUCAS
Figure – Pesticide incidence (left panel) and content (right panel) distribution (%) for all soil samples (EU) and by Country. Note number of soil samples in parenthesis.
Reference: Vieira, D., Franco, A., De Medici, D., Martin Jimenez, J., Wojda, P. and Jones, A., Pesticides residues in European agricultural soils - Results from LUCAS 2018 soil module, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2023, doi:10.2760/86566
More about LUCAS 2018 in: Orgiazzi, A., Panagos, P., Fernández‐Ugalde, O., Wojda, P., Labouyrie, M., Ballabio, C., Franco, A., Pistocchi, A., Montanarella, L. and Jones, A., 2022. LUCAS Soil Biodiversity and LUCAS Soil Pesticides, new tools for research and policy development. European Journal of Soil Science, 73(5): p.e13299.
