Pesticide use hit 3.7 million tonnes worldwide in 2023
Sharely I, Joshi S, Maan M, Mudgil U, Verma K
Phytoremediation
The pesticides sprayed on nearby farms or lawns don't just disappear after they work; they seep into soil and water where they can linger and affect the plants, insects, and wildlife in your own backyard ecosystem.
Farmers around the world are using more pesticides than ever, nearly 3.7 million tonnes in 2023 alone, to protect crops from pests. But a lot of that chemical spray ends up in soil, rivers, and groundwater instead of staying on the crop, where it can build up over time and hurt people, animals, and plants that were never the target. This review rounds up what scientists know about how pesticides travel through the environment, how to detect them, and how to clean them up, aiming to help create smarter rules for using them safely.
Key Findings
Global pesticide consumption reached nearly 3.7 million tonnes in 2023, according to FAO data, continuing a decades-long upward trend.
Pesticides bioaccumulate in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, contributing to ecological imbalance and toxicological risks to wildlife and humans.
The review identifies a gap in integrating environmental fate, detection/biomonitoring, and remediation strategies into a unified pesticide risk assessment framework.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A new review pulls together decades of research on pesticide pollution, showing how these chemicals build up in soil and water, harm humans and wildlife, and outlines better ways to detect and clean up contamination.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Human and ecological burden of pesticide contamination: Toxicological impacts, detection technologies and bioremediation.
Pesticides play an important role in modern agriculture by protecting the crops from pest infestation and preventing yield loss, thereby supporting global food security. However, their indiscrimina...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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