It has been applicable to any EU member state wanting to register a pesticide since 2015. So far, more than 40 active pesticide ingredients have been submitted under the new process. Among its effects, the guidance has identified specific goals for protecting aquatic life as well as informed key decisions for risk assessors. It will steer us towards solving the puzzle of how to use pesticides to deliver the effects we want at minimal cost to the planet.

It’s a document underpinned by research conducted by Lorraine and her team at Sheffield.

And it’s a new approach to answering the fundamental question of ‘acceptable effect’ in pesticides.

Since 2003, Lorraine has been building up an evidence base to better equip the world with dealing with these chemicals. As well as lab experiments and field investigations into how pesticides affect both single species and communities of different organisms, studies were even conducted in model mimics of freshwater ditches. Using information gathered from literature and industry files, it was also possible to carry out modelling and analyses to predict the effects and sensitivity of these species to pesticides under realistic conditions.

It’s this focus on working from a real-life framework that really matters, having formed the basis for Lorraine’s work on the document. “We’re using this information to try and understand three main things,” she says. “What ecological systems provide us in terms of benefits, how those benefits are driven by the types of organisms present and the things they do, then what potential effects pesticides have on those processes.”

Weighing up these ecosystem services with the other considerations – the human, the economic, the social – and relating it to what people need and care about may at last allow us to start thinking about pesticides in a common currency.

But the sheer breadth of EU-wide regulation poses a key problem for the specificity and relevance of current risk assessment. Risk assessors face a tricky compromise: it’s simply too time-consuming for every country to generate their own data specific to their needs and considerations… but this limits the types of organisms we’re able to monitor and means we might miss disastrous effects.

In order to turn answers into action, how do we extrapolate from what scientists measure at their lab benches to the creatures, plants and habitats we’re actually trying to protect?

Runoff from rainfall and overspraying fields, for example, can result in pesticides trickling down into ponds, rivers or seas, causing fish population decline and nutrient losses. This is happening across the world (the most notable example being the Great Barrier Reef) and is the key reason the EFSA guidance focuses on aquatic environments. Surely, then, such destructive potential warrants a tight and thorough regulation process?

… Except how it currently works is to carry out individual studies on different species – one on fish, another on a water flea called a daphnia, a third on green algae, for example – then base risk assessment and protection decisions on these results. But Lorraine points out that testing just a handful of species isn’t going to give us the information we need.

“Those studies are to protect the whole environment. Although that has its advantages in that it’s standardised and therefore replicable, the real question is what do you do with that information? What is it telling you?

“There’s obvious uncertainty with each of the extrapolations we make from this. Because of that, we might question how we can go from knowing the effect of a chemical on a little daphnia in a jam jar to all the invertebrates out there.”

She cautions: “At the end of the day, this is society’s decision. It’s society that can influence the decisions of the regulators and politicians. I think we have sufficient knowledge to manage and do a reasonably good job at the moment, but we need to change our mindset. As a society, we need to become more aware of how biodiversity is important to us and the multiple benefits we can get from ecosystems, and realise the implications of chemical use on those benefits from nature.”

Even so, she is optimistic that a shift in how we think and act will increase people’s involvement and lead to a shift in the types of conversations we’re having too.

“Currently we tend to talk about how plants and animals behave and interact, not what that means in terms of providing goods and services to people,” she says. “It’s about having that conversation with people about why they should care about protecting the environment. Instead of thinking of ourselves as separate from it, we’re actually all in it together and we have to work together in order for us all to survive.

“Keeping the conversation going and getting many different groups of people involved in it is really important,” she concludes.

Yet at the beginning, Lorraine admits that her interest in the environment and its inhabitants didn’t extend to considering what it might provide us. She cites her career and research in facilitating the change in her personal outlook on the problem, now preferring to take a more social dimension instead of just going by the cold hard numbers. “For me that’s the most interesting bit,” she says resolutely.

“It gives me a good sense of satisfaction to know that we’re actually making a difference. And that’s the key thing – that our research makes a difference.”

Helping to better our global situation is still an ongoing process for Lorraine: her current projects are extending her risk assessment approach to other chemical sectors as well as environmental issues, including understanding the impacts of chemicals under scenarios of future climate change.

In the end, though, what will make the real difference is our value of ecosystems and whether we’re willing to make the change.