EPA Releases Strategy to Provide Pesticide Users with Flexibility on Protecting Endangered Species

Amid climate-accelerated habitat loss for many endangered and threatened species, the Trump administration released a final Insecticide Strategy, revising the Biden Administration’s July 2024 draft Insecticide Strategy, with modifications including: reducing buffer distances across all application methods; providing credit for any reduction in the proportion of a treated field for ground applications; developing a process to give growers more credit for being part of a conservation program than initially proposed; developing a process to determine the existing mitigation points that could be achieved by practices a grower already has in place; updating data sources and identification of invertebrate species that may occur on agricultural fields; and adding a Pesticide Use Limitation Area (PULA) group for generalist species that reside in wetlands, in order “to reduce mitigations applied outside of wetland habitats.”