The Directive 2009/128/CE of European Parliament and Council on Sustainable Use of Pesticides introduced a community action framework to protect the Environment of the EU and requested Member States to implement policies and actions in order to reduce the risk of pesticide use. In the Region of Lombardy, in Italy, this Directive was adopted with DGR n. X/3233. The aim of the present work is to develop an innovative, easy to use tool to visualize the pesticide surface water contamination, assess the potential pesticide risk and identify areas where to introduce mitigation measures to reduce the contamination, and consequently to reduce the risk in the surface water compartment. The datasets to start with are the monitored concentrations of pesticides in surface water, produced by the Regional EPA. These values are used in this context as Measured Environmental Concentration - MEC. . The ratio MEC/PNEC is proposed in this work as a sort of risk assessment, even though the limitation and the complexity of usage of monitored data is well known. In addition, the ratio MEC/EQS - Environmental Qualitative Standard (annual average concentration), is considered, to address the water quality with respect to the regulattory limit for pesticides in surface water (Directive 2000/60/EC). A MS Excel tool has been developed to map the monitored residues of pesticides, assess the potential pesticide risk (MEC/PNEC) and identify “hot spots”, thet is areas where mitigation measures should be included. The tool is thought to be an anyone-can-use one, even with no particular knowledge of GIS or database management. Its peculiarity to be built inside MS Excel gives itself the possibility to share and to ease the dissemination of results. For more advanced mapping, the tool can interact with ESRI ArcGIS. The openness of VandA makes it a tool suitable to work with other environmental compartments or other environmental thematics.
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