Fewer pollinating insects mean more deaths every year

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Fewer pollinating insects mean more deaths every year
Researchers at Harvard University believe around 500,000 die every year as a direct consequence of failing pollination.

By Stéphane Foucart
Published on January 20, 2023, at 5:52 pm (Paris), updated on January 22, 2023, at 11:36 am
Time to2 min.
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A bee forages on a sunflower in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, in September 2021. MARTIN MEISSNER/AP
Scientists often put a dollar figure on environmental degradation but health implications are often much more difficult to assess. A team led by Harvard University in the United States, however, has undertaken this difficult exercise with regard to the collapse of pollinating insects worldwide.

Published in December last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the results are striking. On a global scale, the lack of pollination of crops leading to less food production is said to be responsible for nearly half a million premature deaths per year. A figure that is probably underestimated, according to the authors.

They first assessed, region by region, the effects of falling populations of wild pollinators (bumblebees, hoverflies, butterflies, etc.) on agricultural production. “Their results indicate that 3% to 5% of fruit, vegetable and nut production is lost due to inadequate pollination,” said Josef Settele, with the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Halle, Germany, who was not involved in this work.

These figures are “quite plausible and even rather low, given what we know about the importance of pollination,” Settele said. The German researcher, who co-chaired a global report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) welcomed “a very nice study which includes large amounts of data in a transparent model.”

The researchers then modeled the effect of this loss of production on prices, country by country, and the subsequent decrease in consumption of fruits and vegetables. Using the most consensual data from nutritional epidemiology, the authors were able to model the impact of the under-consumption of these products on mortality and came up with a number of some 427,000 deaths each year.

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Unevenly distributed impact
Yet, as Harvard’s lead author of the study Matthew Smith pointed out, the data used to estimate pollination failure were collected across five continents between 2010 and 2014. “Since then, most pressures causing wild pollinator losses have continued or worsened globally,” he said. “This suggests that insufficient wild pollination has an even greater effect on crop yield today than we estimated in our work.”

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The impacts are unevenly distributed. “The loss of agricultural production is concentrated in low-income countries,” said Settele, “while the impacts on food consumption and mortality due to insufficient pollination are greater in middle and high-income countries where rates of diseases such as cancers, cardiovascular.. are higher.”

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