POLLINATORS POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION

THE ASSESSMENT REPORT ON POLLINATORS, POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION
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6. RESPONSES TO RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES ASSOCIATED
WITH POLLINATORS AND POLLINATION
its potential spread. In Mexico, for example, there are
measures to control the Africanized bee (Modificación a la
Norma Oficial Mexicana NOM-002-ZOO-1994, Actividades
técnicas y operativas aplicables al Programa Nacional
para el Control de la Abeja Africana). In some Argentinian
provinces Africanized honey bee colonies are prohibited or
have to be destroyed (e.g., Neuquén: La Legislatura de la
Provincia del Neuquén Sanciona con Fuerza de Ley 1796;
San Luis: Legislación Apícola de la provincia de San Luis
Ley Nº 4.899 / 90). In the Australian State of Victoria, and
the neighbouring country of New Zealand, the Africanized
honey bee is classified as an exotic notifiable disease (New
Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries – Bees and Honey,
2014) (Victoria Department of Environment and Primary
Industries – Notifiable Diseases in Victoria).
6.4.3.2.2 Protected areas and other areabased
conservation measures
Another widely-applied policy mechanism for nature
conservation is the use of protected area status to conserve
habitat. This approach has been applied in many counties
around the world, leading to protected status, at least in
name, for significant areas of land (Gaston et al., 2008).
Of course, protected area status is not usually used solely
to achieve a goal as specific as pollinator conservation,
but higher-level goals such as biodiversity conservation
usually apply. In Indonesia, decrees to conserve Karst
landscapes, their natural caves and the bats living in them
(acknowledging their importance as pollinators) is contained
with the Guidelines for Management of Karst areas (2000)
and Regulation on the Delineation of Karst areas (2012).
In some countries protected status is conferred on certain
locations on the basis of religious or spiritual belief. There
is increasing recognition of the importance of protected
areas of this kind, sometimes recognised as “Indigenous
and Community Conserved Areas” (https://iucn.org/about/
union/commissions/ceesp/topics/governance/icca/). This
form of protected status might support conservation of
pollinators, even if this outcome is not an explicit part of the
rationale. In parts of Madagascar local people protect small
forest patches and modelling suggests these patches might
support a significant level of pollination for surrounding
agriculture (Bodin et al., 2006).
Although the value of small habitat fragments has been
recognised (Tscharntke et al., 2002, Turner and Corlett,
1996), reserve design for nature conservation has typically
emphasised the benefits of protecting large parcels of land
where possible. Large areas of habitat (tens of hectares or
more) can be effective for preserving large populations of
species, but because many pollinators move over relatively
short distances (Greenleaf et al., 2007) such large reserves
will not generally support crop pollination on agricultural
land that is more than approximately 1km from reserved
land. The benefits of non-agricultural habitats in supporting
pollination generally extend a few hundred meters into
fields (Ricketts et al., 2008). What remnant patches exist
in farmed landscapes will often be too small to support
populations of the larger species of conservation concern,
such as vertebrates, but can play a very important role
in keeping a diversity of insect pollinators (invertebrates)
to support food production (Marlin and LaBerge, 2001).
In this context it is important to think of small patches
(meters across) of natural and semi-natural habitat
(including field margins, pasture trees, etc.) as a target for
“protected status”. Even individual trees in an agricultural
landscape help support farmland pollinator diversity (Lentini
et al., 2012). The emerging paradigm of “countryside
biogeography” seeks to address the special challenges
of achieving conservation outcomes in these kinds of
landscapes (Mendenhall et al., 2014).
6.4.3.3 Economic responses
Payment for ecosystem services is a market-based
instrument (e.g., Daily et al., 2009; Engel et al., 2008)
that could promote practices that conserve pollinators.
Crop pollination is well understood to be an ecosystem
service that can flow across property boundaries, creating
the possibility for a payment incentive for neighbours to
conserve or create pollinator habitat (Dunn, 2011; Satake
et al., 2008). Some governments reward land holders for
carbon sequestration benefits of certain land uses (e.g.,
planting woody vegetation), and there is the possibility that
co-benefits could also be rewarded (e.g., crop pollination
that is promoted by the new habitat; Lin et al., 2013), but
the effectiveness of these incentives in terms of pollinator
conservation has not been assessed.
There is some evidence that protected area status has
reduced the rate of habitat loss in many locations (Joppa
and Pfaff, 2011), although there are also examples where
this has failed (Gaston et al., 2008). It is fair to assume that
protection of habitat has benefitted pollinators or pollination
interactions, but we are not aware of any studies that
have specifically addressed this question. In addition to
supporting populations of wild pollinators, protected areas
can, in some circumstances, provide floral resources that
support beekeeping (Hausser et al., 2009).
Turning the science-based concept into market mechanism
is challenging (Madoff, 2011). There can be complex
economic and social tradeoffs around the values of
pollinators, such as seen in conflicts among the interests
of almond growers, citrus farmers, and apiarists in the San
Joaquin Valley (Madoff, 2011). Small payments may not
be sufficient to motivate producers, but large payments
risk distorting trade in a way that affects trade agreements.
Because pollinators are mobile and there is a shortage of
knowledge regarding key pollinators for many crops, it can