Worldwide integrated assessment on systemic pesticides

In July 2009, a group of entomologists and ornithologists met at Notre Dame de Londres, a small village in the French department of Herault, as a result of an international enquiry amongst entomologists on the catastrophic decline of insects (and arthropods in general) all over Europe. They noted that a perceptible and gradual decline of insects, as part of the general impoverishment of the natural environment, had set in from the 1950s onwards. Amongstmany others, they recognized as root causes of this decline the intensification of agriculture with its accompanying loss of natural habitats and massive use of pesticides and herbicides, the manifold increase in roads and motorized traffic as well as a continent-wide nocturnal light pollution and nitrogen deposition. They equally agreed that a further degradation of the situation, a steeper decline in insect populations, had started in the decade 1990–2000. This first began inwestern Europe, followed by eastern and southern Europe, is nowadays apparent in the scarcity of insects splattered on windscreens of motorcars and squashed against their radiators and is best documented in the decline of butterflies and the global disorders amongst honey bees. They concluded that these phenomena reflected the now general collapse of Europe’s entomofauna. They also noted that the massive collapse of different species, genera and families of arthropods coincided with the severe decline of populations of different insectivorous bird species up to now considered as “common” such as swallows and starlings. On the basis of existing studies and numerous observations in the field as well as overwhelming circumstantial evidence, they came to the hypothesis that the new generation of pesticides, the persistent, systemic and neurotoxic neonicotinoids and fipronil, introduced in the early 1990s, are likely to be responsible at least in part for these declines. They, therefore, issued the Appeal of Notre Dame de Londres under the heading “No Silent Spring again” referring to Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” then published almost half a century ago: