Assessing the relative environmental impacts of agricultural pesticides: the quest for a holistic method

Systems which assess the comparative environmental impact of pesticides may enable farmers and policy makers to choose effective practices for pest control with the least detrimental impact. This paper reviews a number of approaches that have been proposed by research, planning and regulatory agencies for assessing pesticide impacts. Major issues and challenges in developing assessment models include how to incorporate and synthesize a broad range of environmental parameters in creating an integrated assessment; how to evaluate, integrate and present economic and environmental information within one assessment framework; and how to strike a balance between the advantages of the ease of use of simpler systems with the information-richness of more complex systems that may be prohibitively difficult to use. We conclude that universal answers to these questions are not possible because of different specific objectives, methods and decision-making contexts of particular assessment systems.