WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency today released its final herbicide strategy to better protect threatened and endangered wildlife and plants from herbicide use. The strategy will help ensure that on-the-ground conservation measures are required for all herbicide users to safeguard more than 900 endangered species harmed by runoff and spray drift.

“The EPA is taking a critical step to finally address its decades-long failure to protect endangered species from toxic herbicides,” said J.W. Glass, an EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Reducing herbicide runoff into our nation’s streams and rivers will help hundreds of imperiled plants and animals, including pallid sturgeon and yellowfin madtom, while also giving us cleaner water and a healthier environment.”

The herbicide strategy presents a menu of options for agricultural and non-agricultural users to reduce herbicide runoff or spray drift from treated fields, such as requiring vegetative buffers to absorb pollutants before they enter nearby waterways. These conservation measures are to be implemented when the EPA registers new herbicide active ingredients or reregisters herbicides already on the market.

The EPA’s herbicide strategy also restricts the use of these poisons in and near the most important endangered species habitats. Earlier this year the Center released 50 maps demonstrating where conservation measures should be deployed to protect endangered species from herbicides.

“There’s still a lot of work to do to protect all the endangered species poisoned by dangerous pesticides, but this strategy is a good start,” said Glass.

For decades the EPA has failed to comply with the Endangered Species Act’s requirements to consult with expert wildlife agencies to reduce pesticides’ harm 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 protect endangered species from pesticides.

The herbicide strategy is a result of a legal agreement with the Center committing the EPA to develop strategies to reduce the harm to endangered species from broad groups of pesticides, including herbicides, rodenticides, insecticides and fungicides. The agreement also calls on EPA to take further steps to target meaningful, on-the-ground protections for endangered species most vulnerable to pesticides.