Campaigners warn of pesticide threat to bees and water life

Wildlife campaigners have warned that a group of pesticides are present in rivers around England at levels that threaten insects including bees as well as water creatures according to new research published this week.

The warning came as environmental groups waited to hear if one banned toxic pesticide – thiamethoxam – from the same neonicotinoid group (neonics) will continue to be approved by the government for English sugar beet farm use for a fourth consecutive year.

The Rivers Trust and Wildlife and Countryside Link said it had conducted new analysis of neon’s using official Environment Agency data from 2020-2022, for the Chemical Cocktail campaign, and found that one or more of five harmful neonics analysed were found in more than one in ten English river sites tested by the Environment Agency. Its findings also included:

• at 55% of these 29 sites one or more neonics were above the European Union’s proposed Environmental Quality Standard – the level deemed safe for aquatic wildlife – with 21% of sites having one or more neonics at over four times the safe level;

• the highest neonic concentrations were detected in the East of England, South East and West Midlands in rivers including the Rivers Ivel, Waveney, Nene, Ouse and Tame;

• the highest number of neonics found at single sites were detected in Yorkshire and Humberside, the West Midlands and the East of England; and

• nature charities are warning that poor monitoring is very probably hiding the true scale of impact of neonics in our waterways and the current figures are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amounts of harmful neonics in our rivers and the number of rivers affected.

Neonics can persist in water for months but they will usually only be detected in large quantities when running off farm fields during high rainfall conditions when monitoring surveys and testing can be very infrequent. So the pesticides are likely to be “vastly under-reported in official data.”

Pro-nature organisations claim that Studies have also shown pesticides to be highly toxic to aquatic life even at low concentration levels and even minute traces of neonics in crop pollen or wildflowers “play havoc with insects’ ability to forage and navigate, with catastrophic consequences for survival.”

They are calling for politicians to put in place improved monitoring of the problem, stronger rules on the use of chemicals affecting wildlife and public health, and tougher requirements on polluting industries, by:

• delivering more rigorous and better-funded monitoring;

• phasing out known toxic chemicals from all but vital uses and regulating similarly structured chemicals to prevent replacing known toxic chemicals with new ones;

• specific measures to address the chemical cocktail effect (interactions that incense toxicity);

• doubling the environmental land management scheme’s budget to reward farmers that make environmentally-friendly changes; and

• making polluters pay through mandatory reporting and mitigation plans, with a levy for big businesses that pollute.

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