Abstract
Despite suggestions that animal pollinators are crucial for human nutritional health, no studies have actually tested this claim. Here, we combined data on crop pollination requirements, food nutrient densities, and actual human diets to predict the effects of pollinator losses on the risk of nutrient deficiency. In four developing countries and across five nutrients, we found that 0 to 56% of populations would become newly at risk if pollinators were removed. Increases in risk were most pronounced for vitamin A in populations with moderate levels of total nutrient intake. Overall, the effects of pollinator decline varied widely among populations and nutrients. We conclude that the importance of pollinators to human nutrition depends critically on the composition of local diets, and cannot be reliably predicted from global commodity analyses. We identify conditions under which severe health effects of pollinator loss are most likely to occur.
Highlights
Growing evidence indicates that human-induced changes to the environment may have widespread consequences for human health [1,2,3,4]
Because deficiencies in young children may be most important in determining long-term health, cognitive abilities, and survival [16] and because results were similar for women and children, we present mainly results for children aged one to three years old
Table); dairy and grain products do not depend on animal pollinators [8], and the vegetables providing most of these nutrients did not depend heavily on pollinators
Summary
Growing evidence indicates that human-induced changes to the environment may have widespread consequences for human health [1,2,3,4]. The decline of animal pollinators is one such change. Populations of both managed and wild pollinators are declining around the globe [5,6,7], and the importance of pollinators to farm productivity and economics is increasingly clear [8, 9]. Recent studies have estimated that pollinators are responsible for up to 40 percent of the world’s supply of nutrients [10], and have shown that areas of pollinator importance can occur within countries of high micronutrient deficiency [11]. A common conclusion is that a decline in pollinator populations could have a ‘‘potentially drastic effect on human nutrition’’ [10].
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