By adopting a so-called herbicide strategy, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday it will incorporate protections for more than 900 threatened and endangered species in the approval and renewal process for weedkillers. The strategy calls on the agency to identify ways for pesticide users to reduce the risk to imperiled species from airborne drift or runoff, such as windbreaks.
The new multi-chemical, multi-species approach would speed up consideration of new herbicides and the periodic renewals required by law for weedkillers already in use, said the EPA. Thousands of pesticide products will be covered by the strategy. The EPA said it focused on herbicides used in agriculture because that is the most common use. Herbicides were applied on 264 million acres, or 412,500 square miles, of farmland in 2022.
In the past, the EPA tried to comply with the Endangered Species Act through pesticide-by-pesticide, species-by-species consultations with federal wildlife officials, a slow-moving process that led to lawsuits that alleged the EPA failed to consider the harmful impact of weedkillers on endangered plants and animals.
“Finalizing our first major strategy for endangered species is a historic step in EPA meeting its Endangered Species Act obligations,” said Jack Li, EPA deputy assistant director of pesticide programs, in a statement. “By identifying protections earlier in the pesticide review process, we are far more efficiently protecting listed species from the millions of pounds of herbicides applied each year and reducing burdensome uncertainty for the farmers that use them.”
The Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued EPA over pesticide regulation, said the herbicide strategy would help ensure on-the-ground measures to protect endangered species from runoff and spray drift from farm fields. The strategy also would reduce use of herbicides in or near the habitats of endangered species.
“There’s still a lot of work to do to protect all the endangered species poisoned by dangerous pesticides but this strategy is a good start,” said J.W. Glass, of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The strategy includes a menu of practices that herbicide applicators can use to reduce drift and runoff, such as cover crops, reduced soil tillage, windbreaks, and chemical adjuvants that hold the herbicides in place. “Growers who already use those measures will not need any other runoff measures,” said the EPA. The agency is developing a mitigation menu website for release this fall, which will be updated periodically.
Agriculture accounts for nearly 90 percent of U.S. herbicide use, according to the EPA.
The EPA herbicide strategy and related documents are available here.