ERI: Environmental risk index. A simple proposal to select agrochemicals for agricultural use

Agricultural production must respond to high-quality and improved environmental requirements. To choose adequate pest control strategies, it is necessary that there is knowledge to enable management of many agrochemicals parameters that offer sufficient information to take correct decisions. However, information about leaching, persistence, chronic and acute toxicology parameters, bioconcentration and others are hard to perform and analyze for persons without knowledge related with agrochemicals. The Environmental Risk Index (ERI) reported here permits the usage of available parameters of each different agrochemical. These include persistence (DT50), leaching, volatility, octanol-water coefficient (K-ow), reference dose (Rfd), lethal dose (LD50) for non-target organism (mammals, birds, aquatic animals and insects). These can be compared in a simple way for many agrochemicals and ranked according to environmental risk. To assess the use of this index, ERI values were calculated for several agrochemicals used in USA and Europe and related to their detection in ground and surface water. These showed good correlations. This result allows consideration of the ERI as a useful screening tool to incorporate the environment into local or regional regulations and change criteria for individual agrochemical use according to soil, weather or crop management condition. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.