While scientists often quantify environmental degradation in dollars, their health effects are often much more difficult to assess. A team led by Harvard University (USA) has attempted this delicate exercise, as regards the effects of the collapse of pollinating insects. Published in the latest issue of the magazine Environmental health perspectives, in December 2022, its results are astonishing: on a global scale, the food impact of the lack of crop pollination would be responsible for nearly half a million premature deaths a year. A figure probably below reality, according to the authors.
The latter first assessed, region by region, the effects of the decline in wild pollinator populations (bumblebees, hoverflies, butterflies, etc.) on agricultural production. “Their results indicate that 3% to 5% of fruit, vegetable and nut production is lost due to insufficient pollination”, deciphers Josef Settele (Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Halle, Germany), who did not take part in this work. Numbers “completely plausible and also rather weak, given what is known about the importance of pollination”.
The German researcher, who co-chaired the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform’s global report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, welcomes “a very nice study, integrating large amounts of data in a transparent model”.
The researchers then modeled the effect of this production loss on prices, country by country, and the induced effect on the decline in fruit and vegetable consumption. Using the most consensual data from nutritional epidemiology, the authors were able to model the impact of underconsumption of these products on mortality and concluded that approximately 427,000 deaths per year.
Impacts distributed unequally
However, as Matthew Smith (Harvard University), first author of the study, points out, the data used to estimate the pollination defect were collected on five continents between 2010 and 2014. “Since then, most of the 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 yields today than we have estimated in our work. »
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