Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Safeguard (Safeguarding European wild pollinators)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2023-03-01 do 2024-08-31
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.
In the second eighteen months period of the project, we have compiled existing and generated a large amount of new data on the occurrence, traits, and biotic interactions of pollinators, including those of conservation concern. Empirical work in a network of more than 300 study sites across 13 European regions has provided a globally significant dataset on the abundance and diversity of pollinators in seminatural habitats of high conservation value. We found that, across scales, climatic factors are most important drivers of pollinator distributions, followed by nitrogen input and highlighting an important and beneficial role of bee-friendly habitats. We have brought together how pollinators are valued, ecologically, economically and socio-culturally and reveal that their value to ecosystems and society is wide, deep and unchallenged. Our results suggest that biodiversity offsetting measures in urban areas are generally work well as pollinator promoting instruments. We furthermore explored citizen-science as a tool to implement pollinator conservation actions in rural and urban landscapes. We have conducted a European-scale expert assessment of the pressures on pollinators, their status, the threats they face and identified the most effective actions or steps to improve the situation. At the same time, we have laid the groundwork for translating these findings into mitigation strategies and policy recommendations. We executed a multi-sector, multi-level stakeholder influence mapping exercise, identified the most important and relevant stakeholders for Safeguard engagement activities and established the Safeguard Knowledge Exchange Hub (Safe-Hub), bringing together Safeguard outputs with other fragmented knowledge sources for stakeholders.
Safeguard is using this significant advance in knowledge to inform national, European, and global policies and decision-making. Finally, Safeguard is increasing awareness of wild pollinators and their societal values with the public, policy makers, scientists, industry, and NGOs, to mobilise concerted actions towards reversing pollinator declines across Europe.