Global agriculture is highly dependent upon pollinators with more than three quarters of all human food crops dependent, at least in part, on animal pollination. In addition, more than 80% of the world’s wild flowers require animal pollination, and these plants help ensure the integrity of wider ecosystems. Yet in Europe and globally, wild pollinators are facing multiple threats, and the full extent of their declines, the complex causes of these declines, and the most effective ways to respond to them are not well understood. The EU-funded Horizon 2020 project ‘Safeguard’ (www.safeguard.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de) brings together world-leading researchers, NGOs, industry, and policy experts to enhance Europe’s capacity to reverse the losses of wild pollinators. Safeguard is significantly extending assessments of the status and trends of European wild pollinators including bees, butterflies, flies and other pollinating insects. Using state-of-the-art models, it is predicting the impacts of pressures on pollinators, paying particular attention to emerging threats, multiple and interacting drivers, long-term and cumulative effects, and multiple spatial scales. Safeguard is establishing empirical research for a systematic multi-scale assessment of multiple pressures on pollinators and the context-dependent effectiveness of interventions. Working with our stakeholders, we are providing an improved understanding of the diverse values of European pollinators and develop and test new approaches using multiple interventions to benefit pollinators, from field to landscape scales across agricultural, natural, and urban systems. We are co-developing with stakeholders an integrated assessment framework and tools that incorporate multiple types of evidence to address pollinator declines and direct mitigation strategies at the local, national, and EU levels and provide advice for European environmental policy.
