WASHINGTON— The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today released its draft Insecticide Strategy, a guidance document establishing a framework to protect more than 850 endangered plants and animals from insecticides. This is the latest move in the EPA pesticides office’s work to start complying with its obligations under the Endangered Species Act.

The draft strategy focuses on practical measures to ensure that endangered invertebrates and the species that rely on them for prey and pollination are protected from conventional insecticides. It builds on the EPA’s draft herbicide and rodenticide strategies to protect the species most vulnerable to the 24 million pounds of insecticides used on 83 million acres of agriculture each year in the lower 48 states.

“I’m encouraged to see the EPA recognize that insecticides pose a major threat to our most endangered pollinators and finally step up with a plan to protect them,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I urge the EPA to stand strong against the inevitable attacks by Big Ag, which has spent decades poisoning wildlife and now attacks all efforts to enact reasonable protections for endangered species.”

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a draft biological opinion for just one insecticide, methomyl. It found that this one insecticide is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of 82 endangered plants and animals, including the rusty patched bumble bee, Santa Cruz long-toed salamander, Attwater’s greater prairie-chicken, Karner’s blue butterfly and red wolf.

Insecticides are known to play a major role in the “insect apocalypse,” harming bees, butterflies and countless other “non-target” insects.

“Insecticides play an outsized role in driving our current heartbreaking extinction crisis, but I’m hopeful that the EPA’s strategy will be implemented in a manner that gives species on the brink, like the Dakota skipper and Florida bonneted bat, a shot at survival,” said Burd. “The EPA has to do all it can to ensure that no species goes extinct because of the pesticides it’s in charge of regulating.”

For decades the EPA has failed to comply with the Endangered Species Act’s requirements to consult with expert wildlife agencies to reduce the harm of pesticides to protected species. As a result of ongoing pressure and a series of court decisions, the EPA released a comprehensive workplan to address how it would meet the challenge of protecting endangered species from pesticides. In addition to the herbicide, rodenticide and new insecticide strategies, the agency has initiated pilot programs focused on reforming the pesticide-approval process to correct violations of the Endangered Species Act.

These actions stem from a historic legal agreement with the Center committing the EPA to a suite of proposed reforms to better protect endangered species from pesticides.

The agreement marked the culmination of the most comprehensive Endangered Species Act case ever filed against the EPA. It committed the EPA to developing strategies to reduce the harm to endangered species from broad groups of pesticides, including herbicides and insecticides, while taking further steps to target meaningful, on-the-ground protections to endangered species most vulnerable to harm from pesticides. These measures to reduce pesticide harms will benefit endangered species and humans alike, since these chemicals are linked to severe health harms in farmworkers and rural communities.