Deliverable 28: Specification of low risk products REBECA ...

ERBIC Risk Indicator
To our knowledge, the only attempt to numerically describe the environmental risks
of biological organisms was developed by the New Zealand Environmental Risk
Management Authority (ERMA). First developed by Hickson et al. (2000) to assess
the risks related to the introduction of genetically modified organisms into New
Zealand, this approach was further developed in the European Union research
project ERBIC (Evaluating Environmental Risks of Biological Control Introductions
into Europe; Hokkanen et al., 2003; van Lenteren et al., 2003). In part, this approach
has also been adopted by the OECD for the review of inundative releases of
beneficial insects (OECD, 2004a).
The underlying principle for the ERBIC/ERMA system is the definition of risk as the
product of the probability of an effect, and the magnitude of its impact. The risk of
adverse effects of a certain organism is scored and calculated on the basis of this
principle in five separate risk categories, which are then added up to form the overall
risk indicator. The categories used are (i) the risk of establishment in non-target
habitat, (ii) dispersal potential, (iii) host range, (iv) direct and (v) indirect effects.
One advantage of this system is the very simple calculation and ease with which to
interpret the risk score, hence allowing a direct and meaningful comparison between
different agents.
The authors of the ERBIC report have attempted to compare the obtained risk scores
to values obtained for some conventional chemicals and microbial control agents for
illustrative purposes. While this may be useful for a rough comparison, it is necessary
to exercise caution when applying the system beyond its original scope without
modification, because the risk categories were clearly defined with the goal of
assessing insect biocontrol agents.
In the context of this paper, a key weakness of the ERBIC/ERMA approach is that
the applied risk categories are treated as independent of each other. As was
discussed for the Norwegian Indicator, the simple addition of sub-indices does not
reflect the complexity of the interaction between all defined categories.
Despite this weakness, the basic principles in calculating sub-indices are valid and
merit considerations when constructing a risk indicator for a related purpose.
Defining a Risk Indicator suitable to compare biological and convential
pesticides
When building a risk indicator for pesticides, a number of factors need to be taken
into account.
Upfront, it is important to differentiate between ‘risk indicator’ systems, which are
intended to summarize the environmental risks for the purpose of making
environmental policy decisions and communicating risk, and ‘impact assessment
systems’, which can be used to accurately predict impacts on a particular
environmental component (Levitan, 2000; Mineau et al., 2008). With the exception of
the NAESI approach, all the systems presented above fall under the ‘risk indicator’
category.
Upon review of several reports on this topic (Reus et al., 2002; Mineau & Whiteside,
2005) we deemed the following factors to be most important for successfully deriving
a risk indicator model to allow for a adequate comparison between conventional and
microbial control agents:
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