Experts recommend ways the Canadian government can help wild insect pollinators

Insect pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, are in trouble due to pesticides, diseases, climate change, habitat loss and non-native species.

Even though Canadians are very interested in the health of pollinators, the government does not have a strategy to help them.

In this study, we created a survey for experts to suggest the best ways for the government to help pollinators. We then identified which of those solutions experts agree upon and whether they think that they are possible to achieve in Canada.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

We also asked experts to identify top pollinator research needs that would help support those solutions. Experts supported just over a half of the solutions and also thought they were possible to achieve.

General themes included improving the Canadian government’s way of assessing pesticide risk to pollinators, stopping the spread of disease between managed and wild pollinators, and reducing pesticide use in Canadian agriculture, among others.

We then discuss these solutions and compare them to pollinator conservation policies recommended by the broader scientific community and discuss how these solutions might be integrated into the current governance system in Canada.

Read the paper — Toward a wild pollinator strategy for Canada: expert-recommended solutions and policy levers by Rachel Nalepa and Sheila R. Colla.