Waterborne's Nathan Snyder recently had an opportunity to attend the 2024 CLA-Rise meeting in Arlington, VA on April 16^th and 17^th.  As members of CLA, this annual meeting is a unique opportunity for the crop protection industry and government agencies to meet and exchange ideas and hear updates on regulatory and scientific advances and priorities. While the meeting has interesting breakout technical sessions, the most enjoyable part has always been the breakfasts, coffee breaks, and evening receptions giving the opportunity to meet with new and old colleagues in government and company regulatory and science positions.

The keynote speaker was Jake Li, who is the deputy assistant administrator for pesticide programs within EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. He provided an update on the strategies and priorities at USEPA that overlap with the areas of work around risk assessments, exposure modeling, population modeling, habitat mapping, mitigation, and BMP evaluations that many at Waterborne work to support our clients. He also announced updates to the herbicide strategy based on comments EPA received (released via EPA announcement later that day). Having interacted with Jake for a few years, it is clear his approach to find “practical, fair, efficient, and durable solutions to how EPA regulates pesticides” are being found in the different strategies and assessments being completed by USEPA since he took his position.

After the keynote, the two days of meetings included technical breakout sessions. Nathan attended those with the most direct and important overlap with our work, including “ESA Mitigations Menu”, “Endangered Species Map Refinement”, “ESA Offsets”, and the “ESA Hawaii Strategy”. The “EPA Leadership Panel” is an annual update from OPP leaders and covers both technical priorities and funding/staffing challenges. Nathan has internally been transferring the updates to Waterborne staff to keep our focus on current requirements, and is open to further discussions on these and other topics by contacting him at snydern@waterborne-env.com.