Kontext

Insect pollinators play a crucial role in global and European agricultural production. By pollinating flowers of many fruit, nut, vegetable, protein and oilseed crops they provide a pollination service that helps to assure the amount and stability of these crop yields. This benefit that pollinator biodiversity provides to people and agriculture is threatened worldwide by habitat loss & degradation, pesticide use and climate change. Intensive agricultural practices are recognized worldwide as a pressure on pollinators by producing landscapes lacking sufficient habitat and floral diversity to support pollinators and jeopardizing the pollination services that they provide to crops and nature. Furthermore, while modern crop-breeding has produced substantial gains in productivity and nutritional quality of food, typically crop breeding approaches have overlooked the benefits of pollination for sustained crop yields in favour of other crop traits. This combination of unsustainable intensive management practices and prevailing crop breeding approaches contributes to pressure on both pollinator biodiversity and the yield of many economically important crops grown in Europe that depend, partly or fully, on insect pollination services. There is therefore a need to assist the transformation of agriculture in ways that support crop yields and food security, while avoiding negative impacts that undermine the natural foundations upon which agriculture itself is ultimately reliant.

 

Objectives

AGRI4POL’s goal is to promote the benefits of transforming agriculture from being a pressure on pollinators to becoming a positive force for restoring and managing pollinators and pollination services that support agriculture and provide food and other benefits to ecosystems and people. The project has six overarching objectives (O):

O1: Establish and work with a multi-actor community to drive the transition towards more pollinator friendly farming systems and value chains.

O2: Evaluate genetic diversity of crop (sunflower, faba bean) floral traits linked to pollinator attraction in order to stimulate future breeding of pollinator-smart crop varieties.

O3: Establish how crop types, varieties and diversity affect pollination services and implications for crop performance.

O4: Understand how to optimise ecological infrastructure (semi-natural habitat, managed or spontaneous vegetation) for crop pollination, pollinator biodiversity and multiple agroecosystem benefits.

O5: Assess the social, economic and environmental opportunities and obstacles presented by pollinator-friendly farming options to understand their feasibility and acceptability.

O6: Evaluate how the policy landscape and practitioner awareness of the benefits and challenges influences uptake of pollinator-friendly farming at [sub]national, European and international scales.

Activities

AGRI4POL aims to assist the transition towards a more pollinator friendly agriculture that manages pollinator biodiversity to provide better crop pollination services and co-benefits to ecosystems and people. By evaluating the genetic basis of pollinator attraction to an oil seed (sunflower) and a protein (field bean) crop, AGRI4POL will identify candidate varieties suitable for breeding future pollinator-smart varieties. We will study how pollinator-crop relationships respond to the diversity and rotation of crops, sown or seminatural ecological features from the field to landscape scale, and to future climate or land-use changes. We will provide recommendations for optimising landscapes for crop pollination, pollinator biodiversity and other ecosystem benefits. AGRI4POL will be supported by a sustained engagement with farming organisations and other actors along agri-food chains to assure the acceptability of management options to farmers and society. We will assess the socio-economic and policy opportunities or obstacles that affect the uptake of pollinator-friendly farming. AGRI4POL will therefore showcase to farmers, agri-food actors, policymakers and society the importance of pollinator-friendly farming to food security and sustainability. Our project is organised into seven work packages (WP1-7) that address specific project aims and objectives:

WP1 aims to foster a multi-actor collaboration by exchanging scientific, agronomic, economic and policy knowledge along the agri-food value chain, and by identifying end-user needs and values in a co-development of our research to understand the utility, co-benefits and trade-offs of pollinator-friendly farming.

WP2 aims to stimulate a shift in crop breeding approaches towards incorporating traits for insect pollination alongside other crop breeding targets, and to identify ‘pollinator-smart’ varieties of a focal oilseed (sunflower) and a protein or service-providing crop (faba bean) for use in pollinator-friendly farming. 

WP3 will identify strategies to optimize pollinator derived benefits of pollinator-friendly farming systems for farmers by investigating how crop-pollinator relationships and crop performance are modified by crop diversification (species, varieties) at different scales or under land-use or climate change scenarios. 

WP4 will identify optimal ecological infrastructure for supporting pollinator biodiversity and species interactions to maximize benefits of non-crop plants for crop pollination from farm to landscape scales and establish co-benefits of pollinator-friendly farming for wider biodiversity and ecosystem services.

WP5 will analyse stakeholder perceptions of the socio-ecological and economic values of pollinators across Europe, evaluate farmers willingness to take actions for pollinators balancing costs and benefits, and propose agri-food chain strategies for consumers to assist pollinator-friendly farming.

WP6 will raise the awareness of the benefits of pollinator-friendly farming to policy makers and farmers and promote its uptake by building capacity for communication and dissemination through policy and practitioner networks from national to international scales. 

WP7 supports general communication, dissemination and exploitation activities, promotes Open Science working, and facilitates collaboration with other projects, all to maximise the impact of AGRI4POL.

More information and contacts can be found at : https://agri4pol.eu/ 

Other comments

AGRI4POL has strategic project links to other EU funded research and innovation projects and coordination support actions. In particular, it has direct links via project partners to the projects RESTPOLL, VALOR, WildPOSH, Safeguard with whom it will interact in knowledge exchange, data collection actions (respecting GDPR) and communication and dissemination actions.