Researchers at Harvard University have modeled the impact of the defect in pollination on agricultural production, the prices and the effects induced on food and health.
By Stéphane Foucart
If scientists often estimate environmental degradations in dollars, their health effects, in fact, are often much more difficult to assess. A team piloted by Harvard University (United States) hastened this delicate exercise, with regard to the effects of the collapse of pollinating insects. Published in the latest delivery of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives , In December 2022, its results were striking: on a global scale, the food impact of the lack of pollination of crops would be responsible for almost half a million premature deaths per year. A figure no doubt below reality, according to the authors.
The latter first evaluated, region by region, the effects of the fall of populations of wild pollinators (Bourdons, Syrphs, Butterflies, etc.) on agricultural production. “Their results indicate that from 3 % to 5 % of the production of fruits, vegetables and shell fruit is lost due to insufficient pollination”, decrypts Josef Settele (Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research de Halle, Germany), which n ‘did not participate in this work. Figures “completely plausible and even rather weak, given what we know about the importance of pollination”.
The German researcher, who co-chaired the global report of the intergovernmental scientific and political platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services, welcomes “a very beautiful study, which incorporates large amounts of data in a transparent model”.
The researchers then modeled the effect of this loss of production on prices, countries per country, and the effect induced on the drop in consumption of fruits and vegetables. Using the most consensual data of nutritional epidemiology, the authors have managed to model the impact of the sub-consumption of these products on mortality, and conclude that some 427,000 deaths per year 2
Und Nonally distributed impacts
However, as Matthew Smith (Harvard University), the first author of the study, specifies to estimate the lack of pollination has been collected, on the five continents, between 2010 and 2014. “Since then, most of them Pressures causing losses of wild pollinators have continued or worsened worldwide, he says. This suggests that the insufficiency of wild pollination today has cultures an even greater effect than we do ‘We estimated in our work. “
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