The European Parliament adopted a resolution on the revised Pollinators Initiative - A new deal for pollinators.
Pollinators are primarily wild species of insects, such as bees (including bumble bees, honey bees and solitary species of bees), wasps, hoverflies, butterflies, moths, beetles and other fly species such as bats and birds, that transfer pollen from male to female parts of flowers, enabling plants to be fertilised and to reproduce. Around 80 % of crop and wild flowering plant species in Europe depend, at least to some extent, on animal pollination, and wild pollinators may provide as much as 50 % of the required pollination services.
General remarks
Parliament welcomed the revised EU Pollinators Initiative - A new deal for pollinators and underlined the urgent need for the Commission, the Member States and regional and local actors to take concrete action to reverse pollinator decline as soon as possible and by 2030 the latest. Members also welcomed the European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Save bees and farmers’ agreeing that pollinator decline poses a threat to human well-being, agricultural productivity, food security and nature in general. The EUR 4.5 billion annual value of pollination as an ecosystem service in the EU only records the value of the service that is actually performed and results in a yield of fruits and vegetables.
Ensuring policy coherence
The resolution emphasised the need to close the gaps in key EU sectoral policies tackling pollinator decline, and to include measures to protect pollinators in relevant EU policies. It also emphasised that dedicated national and/or regional pollinator protection strategies are essential tools to mobilise all relevant parties and manage all actions needed to reverse pollinator decline.
The Commission and the Member States are called on to:
- create a specific chapter within the CAP strategic plans to lay out concrete measures aimed at protecting wild and managed pollinators, considering their importance as providers of agricultural input;
- ensure that current and future governance mechanisms and platforms are fully functional in order to reach, by agreed on deadlines, the goals of the Pollinators Initiative and, more broadly, of the biodiversity strategy;
The Commission is called on to implement necessary legislative and non-legislative measures that will work on closing existing governance and policy gaps and removing obstacles to meet objectives and targets agreed on at EU level.
Parliament called for a ban by no later than 2027 on the importation of agricultural products produced using pesticides that are banned in the EU for reasons of human health and biodiversity protection and that can cause unacceptable harm to pollinators.
The resolution welcomed the Commission’s commitment to prepare a blueprint for a network of ecological corridors for pollinators, or ‘Buzz Lines’, jointly with the Member States, to connect existing natural areas using ecological corridors and allow species to move in search of food, shelter and nesting and reproduction sites.
Monitoring and indicators
The resolution called on the Commission and the Member States to develop a standardised EU pollinator monitoring scheme to improve the gathering of data about the pollinator population. Moreover, Parliament repeated its call for the integration of a specific pollinator indicator into the common agricultural policy, to evaluate the policy’s impact on both pollinators and pollination, by 2026.
Resources, knowledge-sharing and capacity building
The resolution underlined that the initiative must mobilise sufficient additional financial resources and secure commitments and investments at the EU and Member State levels on a scale and with an urgency that will contribute to halting pollinator losses by 2030.
The Commission should:
- propose a dedicated budget line to support systematic biodiversity monitoring, indicators and reporting on progress, trends and pressures across all Member States;
- set up appropriate governance and monitoring mechanisms, including assigning clear responsibilities to the Commission departments involved in policy areas relevant to wild pollinators.
Member States and the Commission are called on to:
- support research to better understand: (i) the impact of substances with endocrine disrupting properties on pollinators; (ii) the interactions, including in terms of competition, between honeybee colonies and native/wild pollinators;
- provide small grant schemes to experts, civil society representatives and individuals to support local and regional actions for pollinators and to enable an EU platform for wild pollinators to be set up to coordinate their efforts and facilitate knowledge-sharing on a long-term basis;
- maintain and improve the European Butterfly Monitoring Schemes across the EU;
- launch and maintain a public EU database that will be required for the future EU pollinator monitoring scheme;
- support education programmes for beekeepers and agronomy students in order to build capacity for the management and promotion of biodiversity and pollination as an ecosystem service.