Pesticide regulations failing to protect river biodiversity

Transcript from  The World Today (ABC)

ELEANOR HALL: Australian scientists are calling for tighter regulation of pesticides, citing a study showing the current regime is failing to prevent the loss of water insects and other river life.

The research has found that freshwater aquatic insects are 42 per cent less common in polluted areas, compared to less contaminated areas in Europe.

Lexi Metherell has been speaking to one of the study's authors, Dr Ben Kefford, from the UTS Centre for Environmental Sustainability.

BEN KEFFORD: Pesticides are widely used in agriculture throughout the world and because they're designed to harm agricultural pests they also have the ability to harm the natural environment as well.

And because of that, regulatory authorities around the world have got a lot of steps to try to prevent harm to the natural environment from pesticides and in most places, including Australia, they aim not to have significant off-field impacts.

But what we're saying is that's not the case. We're showing that pesticides currently used in recent studies in southern Victoria, in France and in Germany, we are having a significant loss of biodiversity in streams and that's quite important.

LEXI METHERELL: You find that the difference between the biodiversity in contaminated rivers, versus non-contaminated rivers was between 27 per cent in Australia and up to 42 per cent in Europe. Why is biodiversity in rivers important?

BEN KEFFORD: We have declining biodiversity throughout the world and the loss of biodiversity in fresh water is some of the greatest of all ecosystems, more so than some other ecosystems, and the biodiversity's important in its own right and we're just losing all these species.

Plus, they're also important in what they do for us, in that they also allow ecosystems to function healthily and we can get benefits from those in fresh water environments, things like fresh water, fish, recreation et cetera.

So, if we don't look after the organisms that live in the fresh water, the fresh water won't look after us and we won't have those benefits.

LEXI METHERELL: What can be done to ameliorate the effect of fertilisers and pesticides on river biodiversity?

BEN KEFFORD: Once it's in the river and once it's causing an impact, it's hard to do a lot about it, but what we can do is we can try to stop it getting through in the first place and that could include things like vegetative buffer strips planted along the sides of rivers, trying to prevent channelised flow going directly from agricultural crops into rivers.

But it probably also should include things like different types of studies when pesticides are being registered, to not just looking at the effects in the laboratory and in semi-natural test systems, but also considering the effects in the real world, like what we did here.

And, I think one of the reasons why the current regulation is failing to protect stream ecosystems is because the current regulation is based around laboratory studies and semi-natural test systems.

It's not based around, or doesn't include a component of looking at the effects of pesticides in the real world, in real streams.

LEXI METHERELL: And should this study provide the impetus for tougher regulation in this area?

BEN KEFFORD: I would think so. I think it should provide the impetus to reviewing how we register pesticides and how we manage them. So, to look at their effects in the field should be an integral component of their registration and management.

And, after they've been registered, there should be some component of monitoring to see whether the assumptions behind the risk assessments in the registration were in fact accurate.

Currently, that's not the case.

ELEANOR HALL: That's environmental scientist, Dr Ben Kefford, from the University of Technology Sydney.