AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

Groundwater is one of the most important resources in Denmark. It is consumed by private households, agriculture, fisheries, institutions and industry. Agricultural pesticides have been used in Denmark to protect crop yields. Most of the drinking water wells are located close to fields on which pesticides have been intensively applied. To fulfill the aim of Groundwater Directive 2006, Danish groundwater should have “good groundwater chemical status” by 2015. This directive has set up detection limits for concentrations of pesticides in drinking water. In 2011 the Danish government by law established a mandatory 25 meter pro-tection zone around water wells, allowing no commercial use of pesticides. In 2011 the Public Accounts Committee criticized the Danish Ministry of the Environment for their handling of securing that the limit values for pesticides in groundwater was uphold. In response to the crit-ic the Environmental Protection Agency presented their initiatives to improve the conditions through their Pesticide strategy for the period 2013-2015. The Environmental Protection Agency has put forward a plan to decrease the use of the most harmful pesticides with 40 % by the end of 2015. The Pesticide Strategy also involves new planned legislation which should increase the taxes on the pesticides, which are believed to have the most detrimental impact on the environment. The aim of this project was to define how pesticides best can be legislated in order to protect both groundwater aquifers, while maintaining high levels of agricultural production. By use of a stakeholder analysis, the most important stakeholders were identi-fied. Afterwards the stakeholders were analyzed, to find the ones that were most important to interview, to help answering the research questions and problem formulation. For interviewing the following stakeholders were chosen the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Danish Water and Wastewater Association (DANVA), Nature Agency, Danish Agri-culture & Food Council (DAFC) and a municipality (Solrød). It was concluded, that a lot are done to prevent further pollution of the Danish groundwater. And generally the current way of regulating pesticides seems appropriate. However certain restrictions such as ban of private use of pesticides seem to be an obvious regulation to prevent pesticide leaching, combined with incorporation of the methods from the KUPA project regarding sandy soils, to regulate the use in the areas vulnerable for pesticide leaching. With regard to pin pointing the clay soils vulnerable for leaching further investigations are needed.