Proposal of a ranking methodology for plant threats in the EU.

Abstract

Following a request of the European Commission, EFSA and ANSES, beneficiary of the EFSA tasking grant on horizon scanning for plant pests (GP/EFSA/ALPHA/2017/02), developed a methodology to order by risk non‐regulated pests recently identified through the monitoring of media and scientific literature. The ranking methodology proposed at the end of the pilot phase was based on the scoring of pests under evaluation following 16 criteria related to the steps of the pest risk assessment scheme. The multicriteria matrix of scores obtained was then submitted to the multicriteria analysis method PROMETHEE. The pilot methodology was tested on a limited number of pests (14 pests identified during the monitoring activity, and 4 ‘control’ pests whose well‐known risk should be reflected either in a positive or negative score), then applied on all non‐regulated pests identified through the media and scientific literature monitoring in the first 2 years of the project. After having collected feedback from the targeted final users (EU risk managers), the methodology underwent a few refinements: (i) implementation of the methodology to a set of already assessed reference pests from EFSA opinions, (ii) exclusions of three criteria from the scoring phase, (iii) identification of pests proposed for further action (‘positive’ pests), using a threshold defined after scoring the reference pests.