By Elizabeth Stulberg, PhD, and Victoria Swiler, Lewis-Burke Associates LLC
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a final Herbicide Strategy on August 20, a move that it anticipates will protect more than 900 federally endangered and threatened (“listed”) species from the potential impacts of herbicides. Since the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed in 1973, EPA has reviewed pesticides for their impact on listed species on a case-by-case basis. This means that a well-established and commonly used pesticide could, in the event of a newly listed endangered species, suddenly run afoul of EPA’s enforcement of the ESA. This creates uncertainty for farmers and herbicide developers, and is also costly for EPA, which has to then individually update labels and which has been sued multiple times since 2021 over thousands of pesticide products that it has not been able to ensure comply with the ESA.
The new Strategy does not impose any requirements or restrictions on pesticides, but, rather, is a three-step decision framework EPA will use to more rapidly determine mitigation strategies that pesticide applicators can use to reduce herbicide exposure to listed species depending on relative risks. For example, the Strategy recognizes that a flat field in a dry area has less potential runoff, and some herbicides pose more population-level risk than others. EPA is developing a website with an array of mitigation strategies, such as cover crops, windbreaks, and berms, which it plans to update as new options become available. This will allow pesticide applicators to use the most up-to-date strategies without EPA needing to issue a new label.
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