Pulse Brain · Growing Health Evidence Index
Peer-reviewed

Pollinator Deficits, Food Consumption, and Consequences for Human Health: A Modeling Study

Matthew R. Smith, Nathaniel D. Mueller, Marco Springmann, Timothy B. Sulser, Lucas A. Garibaldi, James Gerber, Keith Wiebe, Samuel S. Myers

Environmental Health Perspectives · 2022

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Summary

BACKGROUND: Animal pollination supports agricultural production for many healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, that provide key nutrients and protect against noncommunicable disease. Today, most crops receive suboptimal pollination because of limited abundance and diversity of pollinating insects. Animal pollinators are currently suffering owing to a host of direct and indirect anthropogenic pressures: land-use change, intensive farming techniques, harmful pesticides, nutritional stress, and climate change, among others. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to model the impacts on current global human health from insufficient pollination via diet. METHODS: We used a climate zonation approach to estimate current yield gaps for animal-pollinated foods and estimated the proportion of

Source type
Peer-reviewed study
DOI
10.1289/ehp10947
Catalogue ID
BFmokjof1a-cilv2a
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