journal article
Pollinator deficits, food consumption, and consequences for human health: A modeling study
environmental health perspectives | 2022
Open Access | CC https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Citation
Smith, Matthew; Mueller, Nathaniel D.; Springmann, Marco; Sulser, Timothy B.; Garibaldi, Lucas A.; Gerber, James; Wiebe, Keith D.; and Myers, Samuel S. 2022. Pollinator deficits, food consumption, and consequences for human health: A modeling study. Environmental Health Perspectives 130(12). https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP10947
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.