Pesticide Risk Assessment in a Changing World

Pesticide risk assessments currently rely on surrogate species and focus primarily on acute lethality metrics, failing to capture the broader impacts on non-target organisms and thus biodiversity. Under the directives of regulatory agencies worldwide, this traditional approach overlooks the complex interactions between multiple stressors, including climate change, land-use shifts, and pesticide transformation products. Pesticide risk assessments must therefore undergo a paradigm shift to account for these complex interactions, which disproportionately affect insect pollinators, other non-target species, and biodiversity at large. While prior work has highlighted the need to move beyond single-species models, emerging evidence on nonlinear stressor interactions and the ecological consequences of transformation products highlight critical gaps in current frameworks. Here, we synthesize insights from recent research to propose a holistic approach for environmental risk assessments that integrates ecological and evolutionary complexities in the context of global change.