Dr Ben Woodcock
Appearances
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
Still to come... There's impacts on the growth of species, their reproduction, their behaviour. Even at the molecular level, changes in the way that individual proteins may be synthesised within their cells.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
We've taken information from 1,700 studies everywhere across the globe and looked at the impacts of pesticides on over 800 species. Everything from microorganisms, fungi, plants to insects, birds, mammals, amphibians, everything. So this is a really comprehensive assessment of what the consequences of pesticides are in the real world.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
Overwhelmingly, we find that there are negative impacts There's impacts on the growth of species, their reproduction, their behaviour. Even at the molecular level, changes in the way that individual proteins may be synthesised within their cells.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
So there's a range of different effects going all the way from outright killing things to much more subtle things that might have an impact over a much longer timescale.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
I think that's a really critical thing about this. This is going everywhere from bacteria all the way up to mammals and including insects and everything else in between. So it's really getting a good idea at that ecosystem level what the potential consequences are. And this is looking at species that are not considered to be a target for pesticides. And it's important to note that
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
pesticides are intended to attack very specific things.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
There are global declines. We know for insects, for example, that there is a decline in their abundance 10% annually. And we see declines across whole ranges of other groups. Now there's a whole load of different things contributing to this. But the results that we show here strongly suggest that pesticides are one of those factors that are adding to that global biodiversity crisis.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
Yeah, if you stop pesticides tomorrow, the world would starve, farmer livelihoods would collapse. What is viable, however, is changes in the way that we focus the use of pesticides. If you apply pesticides a lot, pests become resistant to them. So there are a lot of things that can be done to actually reduce the usage.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
For example, breeding crops that might be resistant to pests, changing the time with which you sow seeds so you avoid when pests are prevalent. promoting parasitic insects or predatory insects or using drones that can really pinpoint where a pest population is, rather than just spraying in general. There's also issues with regulation as well.
Global News Podcast
NATO calls for unity as tensions rise with US over Ukraine
It's not very good at detecting very long-term, low-level exposure effects. And sometimes you get an interaction between two types of pesticides that can make one of them much more toxic.