Science Summit at United Nations General Assembly (UNGA78)

The SPRINT projects (sprint-h2020.eu) is related to the target of the European Farm to Fork Strategy: a 50% reduction in chemical pesticide use and risk by 50% by 2030. SPRINT addresses the urgent need to assess the actual presence of  pesticide residues in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, indoor dust and human matrices across Europe, covering the main cropping systems. Furthermore, we address the risk of pesticide mixtures for ecosystem and human health.
SPRINT is the first European wide effort to monitor real pesticide application patterns (Mark et al. 2023) and the resulting distribution of pesticide residues across all main European cropping systems. Therefore, we monitored during the growing season of 2021 in 10 European case study sites. We took about 600 samples across environmental matrices - soil, plant, surface water, sediment, air and indoor dust and blood, urine and feces samples from 670 persons.
We assess residue distribution connected to different farming systems (organic, integrated), taking the fact into consideration that synthetic pesticides are not applied in organic farming systems, but that they may be still present due to applications in the past or by deposition due to off-site transport.
SPRINT focuses on more than 200 active substances of synthetic pesticides and their metabolites from group 2 (approved), group 3 (candidates of substitution) and group 4 (banned at EU level) as categorized by the EC (2020).
We link the residue distribution in the different matrices to the hazardous properties of the residues (EFSA conclusions, PPDB database) for ecosystem and human health and introduce a Risk Indicator as a base for the 50% risk reduction target of the Farm to Fork strategy.
Based on field results we test the mixtures’ impact on the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem conducting innovative ecotoxicological tests with sensitive indicators. Furthermore, we assess human health effects conducting in vitro tests with colon ilium and long organoids.
The SPRINT session provides highly important knowledge needed to solve the urgent questions on how to reduce pesticide risk as a base for a transition to sustainable agriculture. We provide data and a new risk indicator that can be included in new regulations.

Session title: Pesticide residues in the ecosystem and humans across Europe and Argentina: linking SPRINT field data to health risks

Duration: 9:30 am to 12:30 pm

  Introduction to the SPRINT project by Violette Geissen
Time: 9:30 to 9:35

 1.   Title: Pesticide residues with hazard classifications omnipresent in the European environment and farmer residences
       Speaker: Violette Geissen, Wageningen University, NL
       Time: 9:35 to 9:50 am

 2. Title: Distribution of individual pesticide residues over the different matrices in organic and conventional ecosystem and humans and related hazard, comparing Europe to              Argentina
Speaker: Abdallah Alaoui, University of Bern, CH
Time: 9:50 to 10:05 am

 3. Title: Linking pesticide residues in indoor dust to human exposure of residents living close to conventional and organic farming.
Speaker: Daniel M. Figueiredo, Utrecht University, NL
Time: 10:05 to 10:20 am

 4. Title: Monitoring of pesticides in human and animal feces: method, validation and application
Speaker: Hans Mol, Wageningen Research, NL
Time: 10:20 to 10:35 am

 5. Title: Pesticides and gut health – some pesticides influence gut microbiome composition and negatively impact cells lining the gut
Speaker: Maaike Gerritse, Wageningen University, NL
Time: 10:35 to 10:50 am

Coffee Break ------Coffee Break ------Coffee Break --- (10 minutes)


6. Title: Pesticide Exposure by Air at two Agricultural Sites in Europe
Speaker: Freya Debler, Helmholtz Zentrum Heroen, D
Time: 11:00 to 11:15 am

 7. Title: Pesticide transport by wind in sediment originating from agricultural fields
Speaker: Dirk Goossens, Wageningen University, NL and KU Leuven, BE
Time: 11:15 to 11:30 am

 8. Title: Risks and costs related to pesticide applications on a global scale
Speaker: Peter Fantke, Technical University of Denmark, DK
Time: 11:30 to 11:45 am

 9. Title: Risk of pesticide mixtures on the terrestrial ecosystem –effects on earthworms, springtails, and bees
Speaker: Kayode Jegede, Wageningen University, NL
Time: 11:45 to 12:00 pm

 10. Title: Impacts of realistic pesticide mixtures on freshwater ecosystems
Speaker: Nelson Abrantes, University of Aveiro, PT
Time: 12:00 to 12:15 pm

 11.  Final discussion and recommendations for the future
Speaker: Violette Geissen
Time: 12:15 to 12:30 pm