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      Why bees are critical for achieving sustainable development

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          Abstract

          Reductions in global bee populations are threatening the pollination benefits to both the planet and people. Whilst the contribution of bee pollination in promoting sustainable development goals through food security and biodiversity is widely acknowledged, a range of other benefits provided by bees has yet to be fully recognised. We explore the contributions of bees towards achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our insights suggest that bees potentially contribute towards 15 of the 17 SDGs and a minimum of 30 SDG targets. We identify common themes in which bees play an essential role, and suggest that improved understanding of bee contributions to sustainable development is crucial for ensuring viable bee systems.

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          Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops.

          The extent of our reliance on animal pollination for world crop production for human food has not previously been evaluated and the previous estimates for countries or continents have seldom used primary data. In this review, we expand the previous estimates using novel primary data from 200 countries and found that fruit, vegetable or seed production from 87 of the leading global food crops is dependent upon animal pollination, while 28 crops do not rely upon animal pollination. However, global production volumes give a contrasting perspective, since 60% of global production comes from crops that do not depend on animal pollination, 35% from crops that depend on pollinators, and 5% are unevaluated. Using all crops traded on the world market and setting aside crops that are solely passively self-pollinated, wind-pollinated or parthenocarpic, we then evaluated the level of dependence on animal-mediated pollination for crops that are directly consumed by humans. We found that pollinators are essential for 13 crops, production is highly pollinator dependent for 30, moderately for 27, slightly for 21, unimportant for 7, and is of unknown significance for the remaining 9. We further evaluated whether local and landscape-wide management for natural pollination services could help to sustain crop diversity and production. Case studies for nine crops on four continents revealed that agricultural intensification jeopardizes wild bee communities and their stabilizing effect on pollination services at the landscape scale.
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            Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers.

            Bees are subject to numerous pressures in the modern world. The abundance and diversity of flowers has declined; bees are chronically exposed to cocktails of agrochemicals, and they are simultaneously exposed to novel parasites accidentally spread by humans. Climate change is likely to exacerbate these problems in the future. Stressors do not act in isolation; for example, pesticide exposure can impair both detoxification mechanisms and immune responses, rendering bees more susceptible to parasites. It seems certain that chronic exposure to multiple interacting stressors is driving honey bee colony losses and declines of wild pollinators, but such interactions are not addressed by current regulatory procedures, and studying these interactions experimentally poses a major challenge. In the meantime, taking steps to reduce stress on bees would seem prudent; incorporating flower-rich habitat into farmland, reducing pesticide use through adopting more sustainable farming methods, and enforcing effective quarantine measures on bee movements are all practical measures that should be adopted. Effective monitoring of wild pollinator populations is urgently needed to inform management strategies into the future.
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              Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                vidushi.patel@research.uwa.edu.au
                natasha.pauli@uwa.edu.au
                eloise.biggs@uwa.edu.au
                liz.barbour@uwa.edu.au
                bryan.boruff@uwa.edu.au
                Journal
                Ambio
                Ambio
                Ambio
                Springer Netherlands (Dordrecht )
                0044-7447
                1654-7209
                20 April 2020
                20 April 2020
                January 2021
                : 50
                : 1
                : 49-59
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.1012.2, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7910, UWA School of Agriculture and Environment, , The University of Western Australia (M004), ; 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009 Australia
                [2 ]Cooperative Research Centre for Honey Bee Products, 128, Yanchep Beach Rd, Yanchep, WA 6035 Australia
                [3 ]GRID grid.1012.2, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7910, Department of Geography and Planning, , The University of Western Australia (M004), ; 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009 Australia
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7088-7522
                Article
                1333
                10.1007/s13280-020-01333-9
                7708548
                32314266
                da6a2d02-ecb2-4c94-8cd0-188d8f1aee26
                © The Author(s) 2020

                Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 24 June 2019
                : 29 January 2020
                : 24 March 2020
                Funding
                Funded by: University of Western Australia (UWA)
                Award ID: UPA - University Postgraduate Award
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: Cooperative research centre for honeybee products (CRCHBP)
                Award ID: CRC H T-P - CRC Honey Bee Products Top-Up Scholarship
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Perspective
                Custom metadata
                © Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2021

                Sociology
                bees,biodiversity,complex systems,human–environment interactions,pollination,sustainable development goals

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