Impacts of Plant Protection Products on Biodiversity: Limits of Risk Assessment and Avenues to Ground Liability

Plant protection products (PPPs) are intended to protect plants against pests. However, they are also known to contribute unequivocally to the decline of biodiversity due to their negative impact on biological groups such as terrestrial invertebrates, birds, and amphibians. At the intersection of ecotoxicology, social sciences, and law, numerous studies address the discrepancy between the regulatory framework's objectives to protect biodiversity and the actually observed impacts of legally used PPPs. The main reasons put forward are the normalization constraints of ecotoxicity tests and the inability to anticipate effects in the current substance-by-substance risk assessment process given the complexity of multifactorial interactions in the ecosystems and the real conditions of PPP use. Therefore, the greater the consideration given to the systemic complexity of indirect effects, the less possible it is to quantify the contribution of a given cause, in our case, a PPP. This is a core issue in legal disputes regarding the liability of those who develop PPPs, those who use them, as well as decision-makers who approve them. This article explores legal possibilities to better address the missing link between substance-by-substance assessment and authorization processes, and biodiversity protection instruments. The aim is to question the division of roles between scientific expertise, legal disputes, and public policy.