Caring for Pollinators - Bundesamt für Naturschutz

Ssymank Highlights - Zusammenfassung
5. Highlights
by Axel Ssymank
1. Objectives
Pollinators provide an essential ecosystem service ensuring crop production and food security
world wide as well as maintaining the biodiversity of plants. A decline in pollinators is
thus a serious threat to biodiversity as a whole. With COP V/5 decision in 2000, an International
Pollinators Initiative (IPI) was established under the coordination of FAO - and in 2002,
with COP Decision VI/5, an action plan was endorsed. Since that time, a number of regional
pollinators initiatives has been established, and become operational.
At COP 9, a side-event was held on “Caring for pollinators”. The main objectives of the sideevent
were to: (i) support the various pollinator initiatives, by raising awareness on the importance
of pollinators and possible consequences of their decline (FAO report 2008); (ii)
broaden the work in order to investigate all main pollinator groups; (iii) identify the actual
state of action being taken to conserve and manage pollinators and actions needed in future.
The side-event was organized by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), Bonn
in cooperation with the University of Bonn (Prof. Wittmann). It consisted of two components:
a workshop and a pollinator’s buffet. The workshop started with oral presentations to illustrate
and introduce the key ecosystem service of pollinators with bees and flies as main pollinator
groups and presented the tasks of the International Pollinators Initiative and the practical
example of a regional initiative with the successful Brazilian Pollinators Initiative. A series
of posters with the work of the other regional pollinator initiatives complemented the
presentations.
The pollinator’s buffet was a fruit buffet to demonstrate that fruits worldwide are dependent
on pollination: fruit diversity and our food is directly linked to pollinator diversity and offered
the occasion to discuss different issues of pollination with delegates at COP9.
2. Presentations and posters
The following oral presentations were given:
2.1. “The Brazilian Pollinators Initiative: Update of recent progress“ by Braulio Dias, Ministry
of Environment, Brazil
Braulio Dias introduced the Brazilian Pollinators Initiative (BPI), being one of the most active
regional pollinator initiatives. The BPI was established in 2000, and has initiated a number of
activities, in addition to participating in the development of the FAO coordinated project
“Conservation and Management of pollinators for Sustainable Agriculture, Through an Ecosystem
Approach”. Amongst the activities initiated, the Probio (Brazilian Biological Diversity
Conservation and Sustainable Use Project) Project issued two public calls to support projects
on pollinators management were launched in 2003 and 2004. Nineteen subprojects
have developed management plans for pollinators of nineteen different crop species and
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