Five governmental agencies have joined forces in order to protect endangered species, provide effective pest control tools, and regulate pesticide use with the goal of creating a fair, transparent and predictable process.
The group is made up of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Department of the Interior. All will form the Federal Agencies Refocus on Endangered Species and Pesticides.
“Protecting endangered species and their habitats is a priority for EPA and vitally important to restoring the balance of our country’s ecosystem,” Ya-Wei (Jake) Li, EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention's deputy assistant administrator for pesticide programs, said in a press release. “Reconvening the (working group) with a focus on interagency collaboration, open and honest stakeholder engagement, and transparency is a critical step forward to meet our ESA obligations in a way that’s practical and protective.”
The alliance forms the Interagency Working Group (IWG), which was created in 2018 under the farm bill, whose objective is to apply improvements to species conservation processes that are able to extend beyond different administrations.
The collaboration of stakeholders with federal agencies is vital to species conservation, according to IWG.
