Decline of Pollinators: Wicked Problem Mapping
Making connections and identifying stakeholders
Written by: Carlie Guilfoile, Krystal Tung, Margaret Urban, Edwin Cho, Saloni Sabnis, Diana Yuh
Pollinators are in trouble, and it matters to everyone. Yes, farmers are concerned, as are beekeepers and scientists, but why does it matter to you? Much of the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the sheets on your bed, and the wood in your furniture needed a pollinator to come into existence.
While you might picture honey bees as pollinators, other animals are responsible for the majority of pollination. Birds, bats, rodents, monkeys, marsupials, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, and wasps and more than 20,000 other species of bees do the majority of the work pollinating. (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 2016) In the state of Pennsylvania, honey bees are essential, but wild or native bees do most of the work. (Penn State Extension, 2016)
It is difficult to overstate the importance of pollinators to agriculture or in the broader environment. Globally, over seventy-five percent of food crops depend on animals for pollination. When considering wild flowering plants, the number dependent on animal pollination jumps to ninety percent (IPBES, 2016) . Pollinators play vital roles in most ecosystems on our planet. The fact that these essential animals are disappearing could radically change life on the earth yet we are only just beginning to understand the causes or the depth of the problem.
The Project: Decline of Pollinators
Mapping out the wicked problem and the identifying stakeholders is one of five class assignments that we will complete to explore the transition towards a more sustainable future, specifically addressing the decline of pollinators. The goals of these assignments was to conduct background research that would enable us to understand the complexity and magnitude of the problem.
Our group began by conducting individual research on the issue, each learning more about related topics such as habitat loss, mono cropping, and colony collapse disorder, to name a few. Once we established some foundational knowledge of the various speculated causes of pollinator decline, we diversified our research and explored specific facets of the issue in depth. These topics included industrial agriculture practices, food scarcity concerns, economic impact, large-scale environmental impact, urbanization, wild versus managed pollinators, and existing private and public solutions.
We then began to tackle the assignments, shown below.
Wicked Problem Mapping
Goal
One of our primary goals for mapping out the wicked problem was to explore the interconnectedness of issues, causes and effects under the broader social, economic, environmental, technological and governance themes. We aimed to gain a more thorough understanding of the problem, thinking of not just the consequences, but also the root causes– further divided into primary and secondary ones.
Process
- Discussion
First we discussed our secondary findings and used sticky notes to collect points of interest. This exercise helps us all get familiar with the problem space from areas that we hadn’t personally looked into. This is where we began to have a shared understanding of the problem. - Affinity diagramming
After collecting all of our research points onto post-it notes, we began clustering them into themes, eventually creating nodes (broader themes) and subgroups. As this developed, we started applying visual coding to emphasize a visual understanding of the the hierarchies, connections and groups. - Making connections
We began making connections between all the nodes to identify interdependent relationships as well as the positive and negative feedback loops. To make space for exploring these messy spaghetti relationships, we transferred the map onto a physical whiteboard. - Creating the digital map
To organize our map further, we transferred it to the digital domain using a collaborative mind-mapping tool (Mind Mup). This made a lot of our messy tangles more streamlined. We also began working on creating a more self-explanatory map using descriptive phrases over keyword phrases to create lesser room for ambiguity.
Key Findings
Once we identified as many issues as possible on our wicked problem map, we deepened that understanding by drawing lines that represented interdependencies and interrelationships within the problem. Our key findings yielded from this process.
As seen in Image 1, The first connection we made was between the food consumer and industrial, single-crop farms. We started with the consumer because in our capitalistic system, we believe many of the systematic problems are perpetuated by human behavior and values. In this case, the average Pittsburgh food consumer expects to buy affordable fresh fruits and vegetables year-round, even though they might be out of season or shipped from across the world. These expectations (nurtured by our lifestyle) give rise to large, monoculture farms in Pennsylvania and across the United States. These farms produce one crop so that they can lower maintenance costs and sell food at scale to consumers. While this is efficient for the farmer, it is harmful to biodiversity and the environment at large.
The next interdependency seen in Image 1 is between industrial farms and policymakers. Industrial farms in the U.S. receive large subsidies from lawmakers called agricultural subsidies that supplement farmers income, manage the supply of agricultural commodities, and influence the cost and supply of such commodities. This allows farmers to sell their crops at a lower price, but also gives them power to lobby government in favor of policies that are good economically, but have a negative effect on biodiversity, pollinators, and even small farmers.
Image 2 begins to demonstrate the existing connections between economic and infrastructural/technical elements of industrial agriculture. The economic need for higher profits and lower costs leads to the dominance of large-scale monoculture farms and heavy reliance on GMOs and pesticides. In turn, these practices increase the efficiency of farming and enable the system of industrial agriculture to continue. Additionally, studies have repeatedly shown that pesticide-resistant GMOs encourages over-usage of pesticides, creating a self-reinforcing cycle (Benbrook, 2012; Perry et al., 2016;; Almeida et al, 2017).
Pesticides obviously have a direct impact on the decline of pollinator populations. In fact, most existing literature on declining populations of pollinators focus on the harmful effects of pesticides, especially neonicotinoids. However, pesticides are only a small fragment of a very large, complex, and interconnected problem. As shown in Image 3, infrastructural and technological changes are related to other environmental issues that impact pollinators both directly and indirectly. Physical transformations of land into large monoculture farms cause loss of biodiversity and natural habitats, making it difficult for pollinators to survive. Industrialized agriculture and globalized food production are also linked to acceleration of climate change. It is estimated that agriculture is responsible for almost 25 percent of the continuing increase in greenhouse gas emissions (Lin et al., 2011). Climate change not only creates a more hostile environment for pollinators, but causes impairments in their behaviors, affecting migratory patterns and pollinator-plant interactions.
Despite all of the negative impacts industrial agriculture has on pollinators, industrial agriculture remains heavily dependent on pollination services. In 2014, it was estimated that honeybees alone contributed 15 billion dollars to the US economy (The White House, 2014), which demonstrates how much is at stake economically. Because large scale monoculture farms are inhospitable to native and wild bees, the demand for commercial beekeeping is increasing. However, typical commercial beekeeping practices, such as the long-distance transportation of bees and the extraction of honey and pollen, can be detrimental to the health of bees (Charles, 2013).
To tie it all back together, social issues lie at the root of these cyclical relationships; our anthropocentric mindset, lack of awareness, and unlimited growth mentality determine our consumption habits, setting off a series of negative chain reactions.
The mapping out of the wicked problem helped us to understand the decline of pollinators as a complex, systemic issue. In particular, visualizing the interconnected, interdependent relationships enabled us to identify various stakeholders and potential points of leverage.
Identifying Stakeholders
Goal
A difficulty in analyzing stakeholders is that particular groups typically receive more attention, sympathy, and have their issues addressed more thoroughly relative to others. Creating a stakeholder map is exceptionally useful as it allows us to dissect the goals and fears of wildly different stakeholders and identify their shared conflicts and interests. Doing this type of analysis sets all perspectives on the same playing field; no group’s actions are considered inherently “good” or “bad”. For us as designers, this fosters a neutral and holistic approach to examine the decline in pollinators with greater granularity.
Process
In terms of defining a stakeholder group in this context, we boil it down to two key characteristics:
1. A stakeholder is any group or entity where the success or failure of their goals and interests are dependent on, or are in some way impacted by, the decline in pollinators.
2. A stakeholder is any group or entity that possesses a high amount of influence within the context of the decline in pollinators.
The first part of the definition is the most obvious but also the most reliable way to define and identify a stakeholder group. This category includes beekeepers, pollinators themselves, commercial farmers, etc.
The second half of the definition relates to a group’s influential depth and applies to policy makers as well as smaller groups that still drive the behaviors of primary stakeholders, such as consumers. It is worth noting however that as a stand-alone metric, a group’s level of influence is a poor definition as some extremely impacted groups such as pollinators have little to no influence on the problem despite having a clear stake in it.
From this definition and after putting together a comprehensive list of stakeholder groups, three were picked for comparison in our stakeholder map (insert appropriate fig # here). Although relevancy played a subtle part in how we arrived at these three, each has their own specific significance to the problem.
From our wicked problems map, industrial agriculture is a key player in many of the issues at work due to its power of influence economically and socially. It is seen as both a beneficiary of thriving pollinators but also a perpetrator of their decline. As a force that touches many points in the wicked problem super-system, industrial agriculture is given its own representative in the stakeholder map with the commercial farmer.
To compliment big corporations and rampant economic growth, bees are picked as their foil. Referring to bees in a general sense (encompassing wild and commercial), this subset of pollinators is the most widely studied and the consequences of perturbations in the system are well-documented. Within the map, they represent the environment and are the most impacted group. An important distinction to be made however is the difference between wild and commercial honey bees. Due to their widespread management as a commodity, census data is better kept for commercial bees compared to wild ones, and each experiences wildly different consequences from similar interventions (National Research Council, 2007).
The third and last stakeholder is the conscious consumer, which refers to any consumer that has a high ecological literacy. This group notably has a foot in each camp. They would like to reap the benefits of big corporate agriculture through instant, year-round access to all crops and produce all while being cheap and affordable. Additionally, they understand the importance of sustainability, supporting local economies, and protecting the environment. This hot-cold nature speaks to many topics such as societal perception and mindset, how economic class relates to one’s ability to take environmentally positive actions, etc. The conscious consumer is a nuanced group but a loaded one at that.
After the selection process, each group’s desires and concerns were then speculated on and diagrammed. There is no “good” or “bad” entry morally, but only in the sense of whether they support or interrupt a group’s goals and lifestyle. Affinities and tensions were identified between each group’s goals and fears with lines. These lines mark where groups have a shared interest and where they have a distinct conflict. The most difficult part of this analysis was “reverse logic” and figuring out if certain fears could align with certain hopes. To aid in this, each group pairing (three in total) was given their own page of affinity and tension lines to better isolate and articulate a pair’s relationship.
Analysis of Interconnections
When we mapped out stakeholder alignment on issues (green lines), our biggest takeaway was how much alignment actually existed, something that tends to get drowned out in the (justifiably) contentious relationship between pollinators and industrial agriculture. What we often forget is that these three stakeholders all share the desire to have diversity and availability of food, as well as fear the impact of climate change.
In particular, while industrial agriculture is generally responsible for contributing to the decline of pollinators with their practices, Pennsylvania growers gain about $250 million in economic value from animal-pollinated fruits and vegetables, and an additional $9.3 million from crops where pollination produces seeds (Penn State University, 2019). Additionally, from a nutritional standpoint, crops that depend fully or partially on animal pollination contain more than 90% of vitamin C, as well as the whole or majority of lycopene, vitamin A, calcium, carotenoids, and several antioxidants that are recommended for our diet (Eilers, 2011). Finally, just as we need a diversity of nutrients in our diet to stay healthy, so do bees. In sum, despite some conflicting interests, these three stakeholders share a lot of common goals.
While there was a great deal of alignment between the needs and preferences of conscious consumers and pollinators, the relationships with commercial farmers were more complex. On the one hand, farmers require both satisfied consumers and bees for their livelihood. However, the current industrial agriculture system places them at odds. In the United States, agriculture is highly subsidized, with an incentive for economies of scale (Grist 2015). These governmental interventions result in agricultural practices that are harmful to domesticated honeybees; colonies in constant transit; crowding leading the spread of parasites and diseases; exposure to pesticides.
Conversely, wild bees are also pressured by the industrial farming system. Corn and soybeans, two of the most abundant crops in the United States, rely on wind for pollination, so fields of these plants are a food desert for pollinators (Tonietto 2018). Other monocultures that flower and provide bees food do so for brief periods, leaving bees to find other sources of nectar or starve. Additionally, the physical structure of the fields means wild bees have few places to burrow. Such an agricultural system, reliant on pesticides, and genetically modified crops are also at odds with some of the desires of conscious consumers, such as avoiding pesticide exposure, and in alignment with others, such as inexpensive food.
The relationship between Industrial farmers and regulation and governmental policies could change. The large scale farmers are reliant on regulatory support for their use of pesticides and GMO crops, and systems under the current head of the USDA Sonny Perdue, seem only to be reinforcing such support. However, if regulation were to change to penalize the same agricultural practices, smaller or organic farmers could benefit.
The nature of the relationship between bees and consumers or commercial farmers varies greatly depending on species and the environment. Some agricultural areas and suburban lawns are problematic for wild bees as they provide limited foraging opportunities and nearly constant disruption of nesting sites. The varied landscape of a city, with cracks in walls or abandoned lots, offers a surprisingly good habitat for some wild bees. Consumers or homeowners also tend to plant a wide variety of flowers and much less grass in cities, providing a nearly constant supply of nectar throughout the season (Lowenstein, 2017). Unfortunately, while pesticide use is much less common in cities, levels of pollutants such as ozone can interfere with bee foraging (Fuentes, et al, 2016.) And if a bee is reliant of specific species of plant or unbroken habitat, urban environments are more unreliable.
Next Steps
In sum, while many associate pollinator decline with environmental issues and harmful practices in widespread industrial agriculture, such as monocropping and the use of pesticides, the problem of pollinator decline is actually more complex. Importantly, we have identified the mindset of consumers as an area that is often overlooked but largely relevant to this problem. Our anthropocentric perspective, consumerist culture, unlimited growth mentality, and mismanaged expectations for food fuel a series of negative chain reactions that ultimately perpetuate a vicious cycle of aggressive agricultural practices and policies that support them, which contribute to pollinator decline.
In our next assignment, we will continue to further our understanding of the issue by mapping the social-technical transition of pollinator decline. We will explore the problem at three different systems levels, ranging from large, slow-moving systems to small ones that are quicker to adapt to change. We will then use our analysis to determine effective intervention points within the problem.
