Biopesticides - combating pests in an environmentally friendly manner

Climate change makes crops more susceptible to agricultural pests. Between 20 to 40% of global crop yields per year are lost due to plant pests and diseases. Tackling this, modern agriculture heavily relies on the use of synthetic pesticides with negative consequences for the environment, users and consumers.

In Danish agriculture alone, a staggering 37 tons of insecticides and 39 tons of pesticides for seed and potato tuber coating were used in 2022. Synthetic pesticides often end up in surface and ground waters, and currently more than 13 % of Danish groundwater wells are already contaminated.

This project emphasizes the urgent need for a transition to environmentally friendly plant protection products (PPPs), particularly biopesticides that control pests in an environmentally friendly manner, with the candidate of choice being saponins.

Interdisciplinary project

Finding an environmentally friendly biopesticide candidate is one, but other hurdles such as regulatory and innovations barriers and social acceptance challenges must equally be overcome. By integrating the disciplines of Plant Biotechnology, Social Anthropology, and Law (Fig. 1), the project aims to accomplish four objectives:

1. Translate complex scientific findings into clear and accessible outputs that can be easily understood by a broader audience;
2. Investigate the levels of social acceptance among developers, users and consumers, assessing perceptions and potential barriers to adoption;
3. Rethink existing legal regulatory frameworks for environmentally friendly PPPs and think about improving such frameworks together with considering innovation and user incentive mechanisms to stimulate development, approval and use of those products;

4. Propose an integrated approach, combining science, anthropology and law.