FinnPRIO: a model for ranking invasive plant pests based on risk

European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Tayeh C, Mannino MR, Mosbach‐Schulz O, Stancanelli G, Tramontini S, Gachet E, Candresse T, Jaques Miret JA, Jeger MJ. Proposal of a ranking methodology for plant threats in the EU

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.

The emergence of prioritisation systems to inform plant health biosecurity policy decisions

The management of risk is fundamental to biosecurity. Potential pest risks must be recognised early, with appropriate measures taken to prevent or reduce the potential damage a non-native species can cause. Risk registers are a recognised tool to support risk management, especially in project management or governance of corporate risk. The use of risk registers and risk prioritisation systems in the plant health biosecurity sphere has emerged in recent years driven by the recognition that resources to assess pest risks in detail are scarce, and biosecurity actions need to be targeted and prioritised. Individual national plant protection organisations have consequently developed a variety of tools that prioritise and rank plant pests, typically taking likelihood of pest entry, establishment, spread and impact into account. They use expert opinion to give scores to risk elements within a framework of multi-criteria decision analysis to rank pests based on the prioritisation aims of users. Knowing that biosecurity extends beyond national borders we recognise that such systems would add value to global efforts to detect and share information on emerging pests to better target actions against pests to protect plant biosecurity.