More than 20,000 species of bees, butterflies, bats and many others – are slated to decline, threatened by a variety of mostly human pressures. The report highlighting their importance for worldwide food and nutrition and their decline prospects was released Friday by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
The health of pollinator populations is intrinsically tied up with global food security, the IPBES assessment notes. Altogether, nearly 90 percent of all flowering plants on Earth depend on animal pollination, and that includes about 75 percent of the world’s food crops.
The declines are a concern for both wild pollinators and managed ones, which are kept by humans, the researchers are careful to note.The coordinated actions and the institutes and research centres are looked forward.
