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Insect Pollinators Initiative

Programme background

Insects, including honeybees, bumblebees, butterflies and moths, are vital for the pollination of many cultivated and wild plants. Pollinating insects are vulnerable to pests, diseases and environmental change - threats that have increased over the last five to ten years, leading to steady declines in pollinators.

Climate change, in particular warmer winters and wetter summers, has had a major impact on pollinators. The number of bees in the UK alone has fallen by between 10 and 15 per cent over the last two years.

Having a healthy population of pollinators is essential to maintain biodiversity in natural ecosystems, through pollination of wild plants which act as food resources for other wildlife. Furthermore, the plants and wildlife supported directly and indirectly through pollinators provide other ecosystem services.

Insect pollinators also play a crucial role in the production of agricultural crops, as well as pollinating horticultural plants. The declines raise major concerns about our ability to feed a growing population, set to reach 9 billion by 2050, with fears of shortages and higher food costs.

Furthermore, in the UK this could have knock-on effects for food security and a significant impact upon some areas of UK agriculture, which affects our economy. Also, it could impact upon consumer choice and on health through reduced diversity within our diets.

The Insect Pollinators Initiative is a fund of up to £10m that supports projects aimed at researching the causes and consequences of threats to insect pollinators and to inform the development of appropriate mitigation strategies to reverse the declines.

It is a joint initiative from the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish Government, and is part of the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) programme, the major initiative by UK funders to help the UK respond effectively to changes to our environment.

Each of the partners have a different mission and remit, but all agree that there is an urgent need for innovative research to provide a solid evidence base with which to inform new policies and mitigation. It is currently clear that no single factor is causing the pollinator declines and causes are likely to be complex and involve interactions.

The diverse nature of the funding partners helps to bring together top UK researchers across a range of disciplines and brings in new skills, alongside existing expertise in the pollinator research community, to address these issues.

Purpose and aims

Purpose

To promote innovative research aimed at understanding and mitigating the biological and environmental factors that adversely affect insect pollinators.

Key aims

• To provide an evidence base to inform the conservation of wild insect pollinators and to improve the husbandry of managed species, in order to avoid the potentially catastrophic loss of the ecosystem services they provide.
• To provide a basis for reducing current declines and sustaining healthy and diverse populations of pollinating insects for the future.

The initiative aligns with several of LWEC's six strategic objectives, in particular those concerned with the implications of:

• Environmental change for ecosystem services (Objective B).
• Food and water supply (Objective C).
• Plant, animal and human health (Objective D).