Overview
The report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, launched in January 2017 (A/HRC/34/48), stated: "Pesticides can persist in the environment for decades and pose a global threat to the entire ecological system upon which food production depends. Excessive use and misuse of pesticides result in contamination of surrounding soil and water sources, causing loss of biodiversity, destroying beneficial insect populations that act as natural enemies of pests and reducing the nutritional value of food."
Pesticides are inherently hazardous, and among them, a relatively small number of Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) cause disproportionate harm to environment and human health including severe environmental hazards, high acute and chronic toxicity.
In 2015, the SAICM Fourth International Conference of Chemicals Management (ICCM4) adopted a resolution that recognizes HHPs as an issue of international concern and calls for concerted action to address HHPs.
Impacts of Highly Hazardous Pesticides
The environment includes all of the living and non-living things that surround us, including the air, water, plants, soil and wildlife.
Wildlife includes but is not limited to bees, birds, small mammals, fish, other aquatic organisms, and the biota within soil. The impacts of pesticides on wildlife are extensive, and expose animals in urban, suburban and rural areas to unnecessary risks.
Wildlife can be impacted by pesticides through direct or indirect applications, such as pesticide drift, secondary poisoning, runoff into local water bodies, and groundwater contamination. It is possible that some animals could be sprayed directly, while others consume plants or prey that have been exposed to pesticides.
The figure below shows the documented pesticide effects on wildlife at different levels of biological organizations and known (solid arrows) or evidence-supported, anticipated (dashed arrows) interrelations among them. However, research remains to be conducted wherever plausibly interrelated effects are not connected by arrows. Most of the sub-individual data for mammals are derived from non-wildlife studies.
Detailed information on the environmental and health impacts of pesticides and ways of minimizing them is presented in the Synthesis Report on Environmental and Health Impacts of Pesticides and Fertilizers and Ways of Minimizing Them.
Defining Highly Hazardous Pesticides
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) code of conduct (FAO and WHO 2013) and the Guidelines on Highly Hazardous Pesticides (FAO and WHO 2016) adopted the following definition:
"Highly Hazardous Pesticides means pesticides that are acknowledged to present particularly high levels of acute or chronic hazards to health or environment according to internationally accepted classification systems such as WHO or Global Harmonized System (GHS) or their listing in relevant binding international agreements or conventions. In addition, pesticides that appear to cause severe or irreversible harm to health or the environment under conditions of use in a country may be considered to be and treated as highly hazardous."
A relatively small proportion of all pesticides in use are HHPs. A survey of pesticide registers in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries found that between six and 10 per cent of registered pesticides were HHPs (FAO 2021).
Eight criteria define whether a pesticide is an HHP (FAO and WHO 2016). These criteria were developed by the Joint Meeting on Pesticides Management, which is an international expert group that advises FAO and WHO. Those criteria are:
Criterion 1: Pesticide formulations that meet the criteria of classes Ia or Ib of the WHO Recommended Classification of Pesticides by Hazard.
Criterion 2: Pesticide active ingredients and their formulations that meet the criteria of carcinogenicity Categories 1A and 1B of Globally Harmonized System (GHS).
Criterion 3: Pesticide active ingredients and their formulations that meet the criteria of mutagenicity Categories 1A and 1B of GHS.
Criterion 4: Pesticide active ingredients and their formulations that meet the criteria of reproductive toxicity Categories 1A and 1B of GHS.
Criterion 5: Pesticide active ingredients listed by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in its Annexes A and B and those meeting all the criteria in paragraph 1 of Annex D of the Convention.
Criterion 6: Pesticide active ingredients and formulations listed by the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade in its Annex III.
Criterion 7: Pesticides listed under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
Criterion 8: Pesticide active ingredients and formulations that have shown a high incidence of severe or irreversible adverse effects on human health or the environment.
Other relevant information referring to criteria 2-4 is available at the following links:
Information resources
Guidelines
Guidelines on Alternatives to Highly Hazardous Pesticides - UNEP, July 2023
Guidelines on Highly Hazardous Pesticides - FAO/WHO, 2016
Factsheets
Case studies of action taken on highly hazardous pesticides - UNEP, 2023
Highly hazardous pesticides - UNEP, 2022
Glyphosate - UNEP, 2022
Neonicotinoids - UNEP, 2022
Organotins - UNEP, 2022
Foresight Brief
Alternatives for the use of glyphosatef - UNEP, 2018
Videos
Video introducing the UNEP Guidelines on Alternatives to Highly Hazardous Pesticides
Video introducing the report on Environmental and Health Impacts of Pesticides and Fertilizers and Ways of Minimizing Them
Other relevant information
FAO and WHO International Code of Conduct on Pesticide Management - provides voluntary standards of conduct for all entities engaged in or associated with the management of pesticides throughout their life-cycle, from production to disposal.
FAO Pesticide Registration Toolkit - is a decision support system for pesticide registrars in developing countries. It can be seen as a desk-top electronic registration handbook for day-to-day use by those involved in the registration of pesticides. With respect to highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs), the Toolkit can be used as an aid to implement the three steps described in the guidelines of HHP: Identification, Assessment and Mitigation.
International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) INCHEM – offers rapid access to internationally peer reviewed information on chemicals published through the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS). All types of chemicals from the full range of exposure situations (environment, food, occupational) are included. Searching across all collections or within individual collections is available.
Joint FAO/WHO meeting on Pesticide Management - advises on matters pertaining to pesticide regulation, management and use, and alerts to new developments, problems or issues that otherwise merit attention.
United States Environmental Protection Agency National Pesticides Information Centre - provides objective, science-based information about pesticides and pesticide-related topics to enable people to make informed decisions.
United States Environmental Protection Agency Technical Overview of Ecological Risk Assessment: Problem Formulation - defines categories for environmental Toxicity of pesticides and summarizes the toxicity of pesticides to certain species groups.
Pesticide Action Network International (PAN International) List of Highly Hazardous Pesticides 2016 - list shows which pesticides are highly hazardous.
Pesticide Action Network International (PAN International) Consolidated list of Pesticides Bans by country - the spreadsheet is updated approximately every 6 months.
Pesticide Properties DataBase (PPDB) - is a comprehensive relational database of pesticide chemical identity, physicochemical, human health and ecotoxicological data. It has been developed by the Agriculture & Environment Research Unit (AERU) at the University of Hertfordshire.
