Pollinator declines threaten world’s food supply

Hamid said about $577 billion worth of food output at market prices depended on pollinators.

The assessment is not structured to support advocacy, but to give governments, policy makers and organizations a sense of the current state of science and the options to address problems, the authors said.

Fortunately, some things can be done to reduce the risks, such as planting patches of wild flowers that could attract pollinators around fields of crops.

“Without pollinators, many of us would no longer be able to enjoy coffee, chocolate and apples, among many other foods that are part of our daily lives”, says Simon Potts, biodiversity and ecosystems professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

“Pollinators”, he said, “are critical to the global economy and human health”.

Using data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, the IPBES assessment points out that more than 16 percent of vertebrate pollinators on Earth – that’s mainly bats and birds – are threatened with extinction.

The report, which was assembled over two years, draws from many scientific studies but does not include any research of its own. was approved by a congress of 124 nations meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

In addition, more than three-quarters of the “leading types of global food crops” rely to some extent on animal pollination for yield and quality. In the United States, the newly formed Pollinator Health Task Force is also looking into ways to encourage farmers to diversify plants grown on agricultural lands. It is the first assessment of its kind that is based on the available knowledge from science and indigenous and local knowledge systems.

Researchers have a few different ideas about why the species are under threat. But it noted more study is needed on the effects on pollinators in the wild.

Potts said global warming is “very clearly a real future risk” because pollinators and their plants may not be at the same place at the same time. Increasing crop monocultures – where the same plant is homogenously grown across vast swathes of land – mean that the plant diversity required by many pollinators is dwindling.

Greater attention to controlling pathogens among species and better regulation of managed populations of bees and other pollinators could also help, it added.

“As we work towards food security, it is important to approach the challenge with a consideration of the environmental impacts that drive the issue”, says Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.

However, the assessment says that by deploying strategies for supporting pollinators, we could not only preserve the volume of food they help us produce, but we could boost populations and in doing so could even improve production in sustainable farming systems, so-called “ecological intensification”.

Though the report did not declare a full-scale threat to global food supplies, it stressed the need for protecting pollinators to ensure stable output of fruits and vegetables as the global population continues to grow. Insects are a little harder to assess because there tends to be less global data about them.

According to latest United Nations’ report, more than 20,000 pollinator species play a vital role in providing world food supply.