Guidance to develop specific protection goals options for environmental risk assessment at EFSA, in relation to biodiversity and ecosystem services

摘要

Maintaining a healthy environment and conserving biodiversity are major goals of environmental\udprotection. A challenge is that protection goals outlined in legislation are often too general and broad to\udbe directly applicable for environmental risk assessment (ERA) performed by EFSA. Therefore, they need\udto be translated into specific protection goals (SPGs). This Guidance presents a framework, which\udaccounts for biodiversity and ecosystem services, to make general protection goals operational for use in\udall areas of EFSA’s ERAs. The approach to follow has three sequential steps: (1) the identification of\udrelevant ecosystem services; (2) the identification of service providing units (SPUs) for these ecosystem\udservices; and (3) the specification of options for the level/parameters of protection of the SPUs using five\udinterrelated dimensions. This last step involves the specification of options for the ecological entity and\udattribute to protect and the magnitude, temporal scale and spatial scale of the biologically relevant and,\udin the case of regulated products, tolerable effects, the latter defined in dialogue with risk managers. In\udorder to promote transparency and consistency when developing options for the level/parameters of\udprotection, this guidance provides considerations to justify the selected options.