Joint White Paper from Horizon Europe-funded projects Butterfly, VALOR, PollinERA, WildPosh, AGRI4POL, ProPollSoil, RestPoll, and Safeguard

Executive summary

Pollinators are critical for Europe’s resilience of vital societal functions, competitiveness, and food security. Pollinators are crucial for crop production, wild plant reproduction and evolution, ecosystem resilience, food security, food cultures, terrestrial nature conservation, subsistence, human health and wellbeing, competitiveness, the economy, landscape aesthetics and local identity, sense of belonging and nature connectedness, and ultimately contribute to security and political stability. Europe’s dependency on pollinators has increased over the past decades.

Integration of pollinator stewardship across policy areas that affect pollinators is indispensable to achieving the EU’s binding targets for restoring pollinator diversity and reversing pollinator decline. Key policy areas that require pollinator stewardship include: agriculture, environment, chemicals, research and innovation, trade, finance, planning, legislation and education.

Europe is rich in wild pollinator species, but these are threatened by multiple pressures. The largest groups of wild pollinators are moths & butterflies, followed by beetles, wasps & bees, and flies. They are all essential to natural ecosystems, and many are crucial for cultivated landscapes, agriculture, and forestry. Many wild pollinator species are in decline, and many are unique to the European continent, placing a particular responsibility on European countries to act. Managed honeybees are considered livestock and are not in decline, but face colony health problems in many European countries.

Multiple complexly interacting drivers and pressures cause pollinator loss. Pressures include: land-use change, unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices, pesticides, climate change, reactive nitrogen, many other chemical pollutants, light pollution, global nutrient dilution, inadequate management of road and railway verges and dikes. These pressures result from historical, cultural, social, political and economic drivers. These drivers take their roots in societal values and worldviews, with instrumental valuations of nature being currently dominant in Europe.

Implementing the EU’s binding targets for pollinator restoration calls for an approach that tackles all pressures and drivers simultaneously across many sectors of human activities. Currently, numerous incoherent and sometimes conflicting policies affecting pollinators hinder or counteract pollinator restoration. There is therefore an urgent need to assess, highlight and address this policy incoherence, jeopardising pollinator biodiversity and EU policy goals. Doing so requires addressing the functioning of the EU, including siloed governance structures, limited stakeholder ownership, ongoing conflicts between short-term production goals and the need to maintain pollination services as a public good, fragmented responsibilities across sectors, top-down policy design, weak coordination between administrations, and insufficient adaptation to local context.

A systemic multi-actor approach is essential to achieve the sustainable supply of pollination services for agriculture, forestry, and wild plant communities. Sustainable solutions explicitly integrate agronomic, economic, ecological, and social dimensions. This is hindered by siloed governance structures. Insufficient eco-literacy and educational gaps also contribute to siloed thinking and to the underdevelopment of human and social resources and capacities at many levels. Multi-actor approaches require recognising and addressing power imbalances to ensure that diverse actors can access policymaking, including holders of relational values to pollinators, these being the most marginalised at the EU policy level.

Pollinator decline needs a globally coordinated policy response. Via a complex network of industrial, agri-food and trade links, the effects of pollinator loss in non-EU countries will not only affect countries where they occur but can have far-reaching impacts on many pollinator-dependent supply chains that are critical for the EU.

Failure to halt and reverse wild pollinator declines and threats to managed honeybee colony health poses considerable risks for human food security and nutrition, and linked economic supply chains and sectors that depend on pollination of flowering plants (e.g. medicine, food supplements, biomass energy, biomaterials, textiles, fodder, cosmetics, decoration, art, culture, and tourism).

Unexploited synergies between pollinator restoration and other policy domains are opportunities for policy wins. For instance, pollinators are critical to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and many of the SDGs are critical to pollinator restoration.

Many policies and regulatory measures currently lack sufficient consideration of pollinator stewardship, but significantly affect pollinators. These include the common agricultural policy (CAP) regulation of pesticides, biocides and other chemicals, the Food and Feed Omnibus, the Environment Omnibus, the regulation on the marketing of seeds, and the regulation on new genomic techniques.

Based on the evidence synthesised in this White Paper, key recommendations are:

1. Address direct and indirect drivers of pollinator loss, not only pressures. Recognise that worldviews and values shape governance structures, policies and practices. Encourage cross‑sector dialogue and stakeholder engagement, while addressing power imbalances. Embed considerations of pollinators/pollination in policy areas affecting them, including agriculture, environment, chemicals, research and innovation, trade, finance, planning, legislation and education.
2. Implement and assess enhanced standards for pollinator literacy in general education and for specific and relevant professions. Local and transnational communities need skilful citizens with basic knowledge of pollinator diversity and the impacts of pollination systems. Professional groups that are, or must be, involved in pollinator stewardship need especially tailored education for their profession or sector.
3. Make pollinator stewardship explicit, measurable objectives, with clear indicators in EU policies. In particular, the CAP, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, and environmental and chemicals legislation because these impact pollinators most. Set measurable targets for floral and non-floral (see 5) resources quality and quantity, pollinator abundance and pollination services.
4. Establish monitoring frameworks able to provide evidence of conservation gaps and progress toward defined goals, clarifying the direction of travel, and demonstrating whether actions taken are delivering the intended outcomes. Ensure direct alignment with measurable policy objectives. Co-create and co-implement the EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (EU-PoMS) with societal actors, while ensuring that efforts do not divert actors from ongoing activities favourable to pollinators. Ensure the scheme tracks pollinator populations, pesticide exposure and habitat quality. Collect, structure, and store monitoring data using harmonised methodologies, and make it publicly available to support transparent, evidence-informed policy-making. Use the resulting evidence to adjust policies, strengthen accountability and ensure actions contribute effectively to improving pollinator protection and restoration.
5. Pollinator stewardship must explicitly provide the non-floral resources needed for successful reproduction. While adult pollinators depend on floral resources, juvenile stages have different food and habitat requirements. For example, the larvae of moths, butterflies, beetles and flies depend on host plants, dung, and prey, and for some bee species, lack of adequate nesting habitat may be limiting.
6. Integrate long‑term habitat restoration into agri-environmental incentives. Complement annual, voluntary schemes with multi‑year, results‑based instruments that reward farmers for maintaining hedgerows, flower‑rich grasslands and diverse crop rotations.
7. Diversify seeds and cropping systems. Facilitate the marketing of heterogeneous, regionally adapted seed mixes and reward farmers for planting nectar‑ and pollen‑rich plant species. Ensure that any new GMO and NGT-regulated seeds are assessed for their impacts on pollinators and that labelling and traceability are maintained.
8. Restore and connect habitats within human-modified landscapes in line with the Nature Restoration Regulation. Ensure that the National Restoration Plans (NRPs) align with the aspirations in the Natural Restoration Plans, including regarding pollinators and grassland butterflies, and that sufficient funding is allocated to their implementation.
9. Reduce dependence on pesticides, hazardous chemicals, and exposure to microplastics. Adopt binding reduction targets, implement and advance EFSA Bee Guidance, and implement and promulgate Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and transformative agricultural options (e.g. agroecology). Recognise that pollinators face multiple interacting stressors and assess risks accordingly.
10. Establish and enforce a post-authorisation monitoring programme at the EU level for pesticides, biocides, and other chemicals and feed the results into the regulatory system.
11. Adopt a stepwise systems-based Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) for pesticides and other chemicals. Combine prospective authorisation with monitoring, assess cumulative, indirect and landscape-level effects on sensitive species, and develop comparable risk profiles across pesticides and other chemicals. This would improve policy coherence and enable more adaptive management than simple approve/ban decisions.
12. Ensure that the simplification of EU legislation does not undermine environmental policies and targets that protect pollinators or their habitats.
    It is essential that omnibus simplifications will not lead to automatic extensions of pesticide and biocide authorisations without updated risk assessments. Guarantee that the obligation to prevent the deterioration of the status of all bodies of surface water cannot be circumvented or removed.
13. Integrate EU climate change mitigation regulations and policies within the broader context of the biodiversity crisis. Climate change is increasingly recognised as a direct threat to pollinator habitats. Future projections indicate these impacts will be severely exacerbated. Policies for a green transition should incorporate nature-based solutions and explicitly value the co-benefits of climate mitigation for pollinator conservation.
14. Develop cross-sectoral financial incentives and provide access to synthesised and inclusive, actionable knowledge and tools for the actors involved in implementing the aforementioned recommendations.
15. Define and assess co-benefits and trade-offs of pollinator-friendly farming across sectors and stakeholder groups. Recognise that outcomes can be positive or negative depending on landscape context, management combinations, and societal and individual priorities, and use this understanding to guide coherent policy design and implementation.