When the Buzz Stops: Europe’s Wild Pollinator Collapse (Ep. 78)
What would happen if Europe’s wild pollinators collapsed? A new study paints a vivid—and honestly, pretty sobering—picture of what that world could look like, and the effects stretch far beyond bees and blossoms.
Dr. Arndt Feuerbacher and his colleagues modeled how losing wild pollinators would ripple through Europe’s food system. Their results show a clear pattern: yields of pollination‑dependent crops would drop; Europe would lean more heavily on imports; and global food prices—especially for fruits and vegetables—would climb.
All of this adds up to an enormous economic hit: €34.4 billion in global welfare losses every year, with €23.8 billion of that inside Europe alone.
But the study also reminds us that not everything can be captured in euros. Wild pollinators keep much of Europe’s natural world running. They help most wild plants reproduce, and those plants feed seed‑eating animals and support entire food webs. Pollinators themselves are food for other species. Remove them, and the effects cascade—fewer plants, fewer insects, fewer birds, less natural pest control, and a less resilient landscape overall.
The takeaway is simple but urgent: the economic losses are huge, but the ecological ones are immeasurable. Protecting wild pollinators isn’t just about agriculture—it’s about keeping the whole system intact.
Dr. Arndt Feuerbacher is a Professor in the Faculty of Agricultural Science at the University of Hohenheim in Germany as well as heading the Ecological-Economic Policy Modeling Research Group at the Institute of Agricultural Policy and Markets. You can read the study we discussed and explore more of Arndt’s work.
Good to know
Protecting wild pollinators is far cheaper than dealing with the fallout of losing them. Managed bees simply can’t replace the work wild pollinators do. Research shows that keeping 20–25% of farmland in semi‑natural habitat—things like hedgerows, wildflower strips, and fallows—helps maintain healthy pollination services. Based on the study’s estimates, the EU could justify spending about €633 per hectare each year on these measures across 20% of its arable land. Still, adoption remains low, and many measures only support the species that visit fields, not the more threatened pollinators that rarely show up in crop areas.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bees Knees. A podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer and I thank you for being here.
What would happen if Europe suddenly lost the essential workers holding its food system together? Not the farmers, not the machinery our, wild pollinators, A new study explores that exact scenario, and the picture it paints is unsettling. When wild pollinators disappear, it’s not just flowers that suffer.
The study shows that Europe’s food system starts to wobble, harvests, shrink prices climb, and the foods we rely on most, especially the nutrient dense ones, become harder for people to access, and the ripple effects don’t stop at [00:01:00] Europe’s borders. As other countries scramble to fill the gap, their production costs rise too, pushing global prices higher and leading to billions in worldwide economic losses.
In other words, the decline of wild pollinators becomes everyone’s problem no matter where you live. Today I’m talking with Dr. Arndt Feuerbacher to unpack what the findings from this study really mean, why they matter, and what choices we still have to change the story. So your study models a collapse of wild pollinators in Europe.
What motivated you to explore such an extreme scenario and what big picture insights did it reveal? Okay, yeah. So those are two questions, right? And I would like to start with the motivation a little bit. So I’m an agriculture economist who works with simulation models and we ask questions like, what if certain things happen?
And now we are seeing that we as a [00:02:00] humankind are facing a lot of ecological crisis. I think it’s quite well known what climate change will do in terms of impacts, but um, the ongoing biodiversity crisis and its impacts are not as well Understood. And another motivation is that often people complain about the cost of conservation, of what will it cost to conserve wild pollinators or biodiversity or insects, but nobody’s really talking about what would be the benefits of doing such conservation.
’cause we would avoid certain. Events, um, how likely they are is always difficult to tell. So the motivation is giving more meaning to the consequences of insect decline, pollinator decline. And uh, I think we can already say that, uh, such an extreme scenario is maybe unrealistic, is maybe not very likely, but it’s not completely unthinkable, unfortunately.
Let me also add that there [00:03:00] are certain limitations of, of similar studies that have been done in the past before that also motivated us because we have seen that people, um, evaluated bees or pollinators in general. They used also an extreme assumption that all bees, wild and managed pollinators would vanish.
They also used quite simplified methods. They did not look at what we call as economist market adjustments. But coming to the second part of your question, what are the big picture insights? Well, one could say, first of all, a wild pollinator collapse in Europe. Would not mean the end of the world. We could still survive.
We would still be able to feed ourselves, but especially the availability of nutrient rich crops would decline substantially within Europe where the collapse happens, and that would of course impact those [00:04:00] households most that are already struggling to buy nutrient rich food. Because that food would become more expensive.
I’m specifically talking about vegetables and fruits and also nuts, but also oil seeds are of course affected. And another two big insights are, well, they are unfortunately, even winners, uh, or beneficiaries of such an extreme event, which are the producers, they could benefit from such a scenario. And.
Strangely, another big insight is that the effects that we report for different EU member states are particularly high for those EU member states that have shown particularly high opposition towards pollinator friendly, um, policies on the EU level. So that was a big insight and also surprising insight to some extent.
Yeah. Thank you for that. You’ve mentioned many interesting things, but right now I wanna talk [00:05:00] about one thing specific. You distinguish between wild and managed pollinators, which isn’t always made clear when just speaking about pollinators. Why was it important to make this distinction, and more importantly, why does it matter when we’re thinking about policy and food security?
Yeah. As mentioned, I’m an economist, so I think when you first work on pollinators as an economist, you’re not aware that it actually matters that they are wild and managed pollinators. Yeah, and once you talk to ecologist, you learn there’s a big difference because managed pollinators are taking care of humans.
We can basically pamper them, can make sure they’re doing well, uh, can feed them, et cetera, can treat the diseases. But wild pollinators is. I mean around 500, 600 wild bees in Germany alone. Uh, high diversity, often we don’t even know how well they are doing. I mean, the numbers, the populations are actually unknown, especially trends.[00:06:00]
And, uh, we notice that everything we see is that they are facing a dangerous risk of further decline. And of course then at the end of the day, extinction. So it’s the wild pollinators we need to worry about. And the next thing is economists are quick to say, well. Is it really a problem? Because if we lose wild pollinators, we still have the managed, uh, pollinators, so we can basically just substitute wild pollinators through managed pollinators.
But that’s not a finding of our study. We know that from literature that for many crops the productivity is higher if both managed or wild pollinators visit the flowers, or in some crops, many managed pollinators can’t even pollinate effectively. So here we therefore look at the role of wild polinators, especially, and I was actually surprised to see that the shocks that we, the declines in productivity that stem from a collapse of wild pollinators [00:07:00] are less severe for the case of Europe.
And especially for food security in Europe and many people don’t know that, including myself, I had to learn that and I had to become aware that we already have quite some significant, um, moderate to severe food insecurity in certain parts of Europe. And if now the wild pollinators vanish, that food insecurity would be exacerbated.
And, uh, it might not be known for many, uh, let’s say people living in the northern western Europe. But uh, if we look at the, on the Balkan or towards Ukraine also that is a real risk and another. Finding for policy is that we were able to show that the cost of wild pollinator collapse is uh, so high that you could do a lot of good things with that cost.
Yeah. So as mentioned before, if we know the cost of such an extreme event, we have a better position to [00:08:00] justify measures to prevent that, and we show that. Ambitious conservation policies would cost less per hectare, for instance, or in total than the cost of the wild pollinator collapse that we have, uh, estimated with our study.
So at the end of the day, we need to focus on wild pollinators because those are the ones. That depend on conservation and they’re not pampered. And it’s also, I should emphasize not just because they help us to make crop production more productive, but also they have many, many other benefits. As I think you listeners well know, I mean.
They’re very important for the, uh, food web, for being a feed for other animals. Birds, they’re important for pollinating flowers and wild, I mean, wild flowers, wild crops or, or plants, sorry. Agriculture. Economists always talk, talk about crops, right? Uh, we should. Uh, there’s many plants. Uh, we enjoy going out for a walk.
And, uh, last but not least, of course, the ethical dimension. Yeah. We want to ensure that [00:09:00] all species can coexist with us human. So let’s keep your economist hat on again. Your study showed the decline in wild pollinators doesn’t just affect farms or farmers, like you were just saying. We can look at it of the effects of it on prices and trade what ends up on our plates.
What surprised you most about how these ripple effects play out across Europe and beyond? So maybe that gives me the opportunity to talk more about the economic mechanisms that we observe from our model. First of all, ideally we are not too surprised by our models because we should. Know the model behavior in advance, and the scenario that we simulate here is, uh, not a very complicated scenario.
It is a decline in productivity in crop yields. So many agriculture economists would be able to sketch out the rough consequences of such a shock on the back of an envelope. [00:10:00] But the strength of our model is that we can quantify effects and we can account for mechanisms that happen at the same time.
And some of those mechanisms might offset each other. And so maybe make, uh, one example if crop productivity declines, production cost increases, that increases the cost of providing vegetable fruits in the European market that will incentivize. Other countries outside the European continent to provide more fruits, vegetables, nuts, et cetera, to the European consumers because they are not affected by this extreme scenario.
Yeah, let’s say that’s our assumption, and that would mean that those countries would benefit, they would increase their production. But what is interesting is that food security in these. Countries outside Europe would actually also be under pressure, and in some cases also decline because now it’s more attractive.
To [00:11:00] export fruits and vegetables to the, let’s say, higher income European countries. Then providing that to their domestic consumers that maybe don’t have the same purchasing power or willingness to pay for fruits and vegetables. So we see these ripple effects affect countries outside Europe, even though they are at first site and first order not affected by this scenario.
So you’ve kind of mentioned this a couple answers ago. But we’re already seeing Europe, I mean is already seeing signs of insect decline. Based on your research, what kinds of actions, either the community or the policy level feel the most urgent? Whew. Yeah, that’s a wide field, I would say, because there is so many things we should try to achieve and, and we have, uh, a very interesting research project called Beetle on it where we are talking to citizens, practitioners, politicians, et cetera.
[00:12:00] Asking them the same question. Right. And, uh, so, um, researchers at our, uh, our group have, uh, built together with them, have built, um, certain scenarios and in which they have actually identified. Actions and measures that community policy levels should take. And, um, well one interesting finding was that we should achieve higher awareness by, through education, through culture, through civil society, informing young adults, kids, children, and kindergartens and so on, that hey, out there, this nature.
And it matters for many reasons. And, uh, there are. I mean, I mean now in Germany we are talking about banning social media from the youth, right? Because we are getting, uh, less in touch with nature outside. And that’s a big problem because if we don’t have the awareness, if we don’t have the knowledge, it’s gonna be very hard to sell policies such as let’s increase the spending for, uh, semi-natural habitat [00:13:00] in agricultural landscapes if people don’t understand the purpose of it.
So that’s one measure. And then of course, the more direct measures would be exactly that, what I just mentioned, to stop this intensification trend, the, um, what we call the, the cleansing of landscape structures of hedges, of strips, et cetera. And also get a better understanding of the impacts of pesticides on pollinators, and also trying to avoid any unintended consequences because we don’t really understand well if, um, providing wildflower strips is really a good solution.
If at the end of the day they are surrounded by some monocrop, uh, um, deserts where pollinators can’t find anything and they’re not connected to other gene pools, et cetera. So it’s very complex. And, um, many measures need to be put in place and a lot of knowledge needs to be produced in order to understand what mix of concrete measures really is the best, most cost efficient [00:14:00] way.
And that’s maybe important as also as an economist to say, yeah. Um. We can think of many measures, but at the end of the day, we can only spend every euro or pound to dollar once. And so we need to make sure that we have smart policies in place. And last word on this, what we can do, we always point the fingers towards policy.
Uh, public, uh, sector should do something. And there’s so many interesting initiatives and, um. Uh, and instruments from what we call the civil society or non-governmental actors, we actually dub it non-governmental instruments that we observe out there. Uh, we are currently surveying them and, and describing them and clustering them.
We see competitions for biodiversity friendly private gardens. We see crowdfunding for insect friendly mowing machines. Initiatives for insect responsible sourcing regions. I mean, there’s a very colorful basket of measures out there, what people can do at the local community level, [00:15:00] no matter who’s in charge in the capital city and the parliaments, et cetera.
If you could help the public understand just one thing about pollinators and food security, what would you want them to walk away with? Let me say it maybe like this. Wild pollinators and also insects in general are important to ensure a healthy and diverse diet that is also affordable to everyone. But they provide so many more benefits.
They flower plants, they feed birds, and besides that, they give all of this for free. Even if they wouldn’t give anything to us, they have a fundamental right to exist and, uh, we need to honor that. And then we need to ensure. That they can coexist with us also for the sake of future generations that hopefully will be able to appreciate the existence.
One thing from this study really sticks with me taking action to protect, wild pollinators may feel costly, but waiting will cost us far more economically [00:16:00] nutritionally, globally. Arndt and his team outlined several big picture solutions, stronger protections for natural habitats, financial incentives for farmers, adopting pollinator friendly practices, reduced pesticide use, and international cooperation.
All essential, all powerful. But something else Arndt mentioned makes this challenge feel more solvable. We don’t have to wait for legislation or global agreements to start making a difference. Every community, every neighborhood, every balcony and backyard can be part of the solution. Planting native flowers, reducing pesticide use at home, supporting farmers who prioritize biodiversity.
Joining local conservation groups, these small local actions add up. They create pockets of resilience that together can shift the trajectory. Thank you dear listener for choosing to care. And thank you to Arndt for sharing this eye-opening [00:17:00] study. Please visit the Bees knees.website to read Arndt’s full paper.
And until next time, plant and Protect.