Agricultural pesticide land budget and river discharge to oceans

Pesticides are ubiquitous environmental pollutants negatively affecting ecosystem and human health^1,2. About 3 Tg of pesticides are used annually in agriculture to protect crops³. How much of these pesticides remain on land and reach the aquifer or the ocean is uncertain. Monitoring their environmental fate is challenging, and a detailed picture of their mobility in time and space is largely missing⁴. Here, we develop a process-based model accounting for the hydrology and biogeochemistry of the 92 most used agricultural pesticide active substances to assess their pathways through the principal catchments of the world and draw a near-present picture of the global land and river budgets, including discharge to oceans. Of the 0.94 Tg net annual pesticide input in 2015 used in this study, 82% is biologically degraded, 10% remains as residue in soil and 7.2% leaches below the root zone. Rivers receive 0.73 Gg of pesticides from their drainage at a rate of 10 to more than 100 kg yr⁻¹ km⁻¹. By contrast to their fate in soil, only 1.1% of pesticides entering rivers are degraded along streams, exceeding safety levels (concentrations >1 μg l⁻¹) in more than 13,000 km of river length, with 0.71 Gg of pesticide active ingredients released to oceans every year. Herbicides represent the prevalent pesticide residue on both land (72%) and river outlets (62%).