While scientists often quantify environmental degradation in dollars, its health impacts are often much more difficult to estimate. A team led by Harvard University (USA) undertook this thorny exercise in terms of the impact of the collapse of pollinating insects. The results, published in December 2022 in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, are striking: On a global scale, the dietary effects of poor crop pollination would be responsible for nearly half a million premature deaths each year. A number that is likely below reality, according to the authors.
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The latter first assessed regionally the effects of the decline in wild pollinator populations (bumblebees, hoverflies, butterflies, etc.) on agricultural production. “Their results indicate that 3 to 5 percent of fruit, vegetable and nut production is lost due to insufficient pollination,” decodes Josef Settele (Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research Halle, Germany), who was not involved in this work. Numbers “completely plausible and even rather low considering what we know about the importance of pollination”.
The German researcher, who co-chaired the global report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, praises “a very nice study that integrates large amounts of data into a transparent model”.
Researchers then modeled the impact of this production loss on country-by-country prices and the induced impact on the decline in fruit and vegetable consumption. Using the most consistent data from nutritional epidemiology, the authors were able to model the impact of underconsumption of these products on mortality and concluded that there are approximately 427,000 deaths per year.
Unequally distributed effects
However, as Matthew Smith (Harvard University), first author of the study, points out, the data used to estimate the pollination defect was collected between 2010 and 2014 across the five continents. “Since then, most of the stresses causing losses of wild pollinators around the world have continued or worsened,” he says. This suggests that insufficient wild pollination has an even larger impact on crop yield today than we estimated in our work. »
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