Sustainable Use of Pesticides: an Innovative Experience in Lombardy Region, Italy

Pesticide contamination may affect the quality of different environmental compartments as soil, water and air and, consequently, may pose a risk to human beings and ecosystems. The current environmental and agricultural policies of the European Union are aimed at the development of sustainable agriculture production. Therefore, decision makers need innovative instruments to plan pesticide use, while farmers need directions to fight pests in a sustainable way in order to maintain reasonable cost-benefit balances for the farm. A decision support system called SuSAP Network – Supplying Sustainable Agriculture Production – has been developed for an intensive agricultural area of North Italy (Lombardy Region) to promote the sustainable use of pesticides at farm scale. SuSAP Network is a web based software which integrates existing environmental data from different sources to calculate the environmental risk of pesticides, an innovative web service for managing model simulations and a WebGis which displays geographic data.