Loss of pollination

Loss of pollination

Wild insects pollinate many crops for free. When pollinators decline, a farm growing pollinator-dependent crops has to rent hives or accept lower yields. Resilience books that cost as a Business interruption loss, against revenue only.

What the map shows

• Today: Pollination Degradation (2015). It combines species decline (1 − MSA, GLOBIO 4) and baseline water stress (Aqueduct 4.0), over crops that depend on pollinators. Wind has no natural reference, so it has no term here.
• Projected: Pollination Shock layers for SSP1 and SSP3, at 2035, 2050 and 2080. Each combines the decline in species abundance, the change in surface wind and the rise in water stress, weighted by ENCORE. SSP2-4.5 reads the SSP3 layers.

Both maps carry a signal only where crops depend on pollinators (Chaplin-Kramer pollination deficit above 0). This service has its own layers, so it does not go through the natural assets.

How the loss is computed

The degradation D, between 0 and 1, is read from the layer at the site. The dependency is the ENCORE rating of the site's activity, read as (rating − 1) / 4. The loss is D × min(dependency, k) × revenue, where k is the yearly cost of renting hives, as a share of revenue. k exists for high- and low-input agriculture. Its values are provisional placeholders. Other site types keep D × dependency. See Nature risks, Shock layers and the Pollination shock and Pollination Deficit sheets.

Sources

• GLOBIO 4 (PBL), Schipper et al. (2020): Mean Species Abundance. CC BY 4.0.
• Copernicus C3S Atlas (sfcWind, CMIP6). CC BY 4.0.
• WRI Aqueduct 4.0. CC BY 4.0.
• Chaplin-Kramer et al. (2019), Science. CC BY 4.0.
• ENCORE 2024 (Global Canopy, UNEP FI, UNEP-WCMC): delivery weights and dependency ratings. CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Darwin computation

Limits

• Today's level reuses the coefficients written in the shock layers' description, because the script that built those layers is not versioned.
• Species decline sits high and flat on any cultivated cell, so today's level reads more as a dependence on species than as a pollination signal.
• Water stress is an indirect proxy for pollinators, which is why its weight is lowered.