rethink sustainability
Pollen counts: the forgotten pollinators powering nature
To the hermit hummingbird, the Central American ‘Red Twister’ plant is irresistible. It’s long, gently-curved flowers are a perfect fit for the hermit’s unusual bill. Out of more than 350 species of hummingbird, the Twister plant will offer its nectar to just two – the green hermit and the violet sabre-wing.
Without the hermit hummingbird to act as pollinator, the Twister would be in trouble. So, too, would the entire Central American mountain forest. The Red Twister is a keystone species, providing food and shelter for a wide array of animals. The hermit hummingbird supports the Twister, the Twister supports an ecosystem.1
Other pollinator relationships are less exclusive, but equally important. More than 500 species of plant rely on bats to pollinate their flowers2, others are happy to make do with wasps, spiders, butterflies, mice, or even lizards.3 Combined, the free service that pollinators provide helps to maintain and build the healthy ecosystems that are essential for our society and our economy.
The world’s pollinators are in decline, however – under threat from climate change, habitat loss and the overuse of pesticides.4 Campaigns highlighting this threat often focus on bees, which play an essential role pollinating our food crops. But pollination is about far more than bees. And with our economy facing an unprecedented threat from biodiversity loss,5 many of our other pollinators are in peril.
Read also: Figs, wolves and starfish – the regenerative power of keystone economics
Nature’s engine
Pollination is the engine that drives our ecosystems. For most flowering plants and fruit trees, it is only once they have received pollen from another plant of the same species that they are able to make seeds. By transferring pollen from plant to plant, birds, mammals and insects help those plants to reproduce.
With their precision hovering capabilities, and highly-evolved bills, hummingbirds are one of the best adapted pollinators on the planet. A single hummingbird can visit thousands of flowers a day in search of nectar, unwittingly picking up pollen as they go. Across the Americas over 7,000 species of plant benefit from their pollination services,6 including fruit trees, coral trees, and wild mangoes, bananas and avocados.
A single pollinator can have a far-reaching impact. The tiny fig wasp, for instance, is a pollination specialist responsible for supporting more life than perhaps any other pollinator. The fig wasp has adapted to pollinate only fig trees – in turn, fig trees have come to rely solely on the wasps. Fig trees are a keystone species, which provide food for more species of birds and mammal than any other tree, and are often deployed in tropical reforestation projects. According to ecologist Mike Shanahan, “From the wings of tiny fig wasps hang the fates of hundreds of bird and mammal species, and perhaps even entire rainforests.”7
Food systems under threat
The fate of our food systems also depends on pollinators. Three quarters of the crops we grow for their fruit or seeds rely on pollination – pollinating insects provide an ecosystems service worth up to USD 577 billion each year.8 According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), this makes pollination, “the highest agricultural contributor to yields worldwide, contributing far beyond any other agricultural management practice.”9
This vital contribution is threatened, however, with insect pollinator numbers falling fast.10 The European Commission’s ‘A New Deal For Pollinators’ estimates that a third of Europe’s bees, butterfly and hoverfly species are in decline.11
In Denmark, an ingeniously simple study measured this decline by counting the number of insects squashed on car windscreens across a 20-year period – the so-called ‘splatometer’ test. Between 1997 and 2017 the study showed an 80% fall in overall insect abundance.12
The nature-positive solution
Many farmers are now turning to commercially-managed hives of honeybees to make up for the pollinator shortfall, paying for the service that nature once provided for free. While offering a valuable boost to crop yields, researchers have warned that the proliferation of honeybees is adding yet more pressure to wild, native pollinators.13
Some farmers, however, are taking a more holistic approach. In Kenya, Mount Elgon Orchards is a century-old farm that employs more than 1,500 people to grow roses and avocadoes. Determined to minimise the environmental footprint of his production, owner Bob Anderson has rewilded the farm with hundreds of acres of native forest – instead of growing avocadoes as a separate monoculture, the fruit now grow within the forest environment.
The result has been a spectacular return of nature’s free pollination service. “Very quickly we started seeing benefits for the avocadoes,” Anderson explains. “Most farms in Kenya have [managed] bees for pollination. We now see that we need hardly any bees, because we have pollinators like the hoverfly. About 98% of our pollination is being done by natural pollinators like butterflies, moths, hoverflies, stingless bees, wasps and so on.”14
A similar story is playing out in Ghana’s cocoa plantations. The cocoa plant is pollinated mostly by tiny midges, each little larger than a speck of dust. The midges thrive in the shaded, moist environments of tropical forests, where cocoa is found naturally. In West Africa, however, as the cocoa industry has grown, deforestation has degraded soils and left cocoa plantations without the natural shade that their pollinators crave.15
Since 2019, a Ghanaian government-led initiative has helped 140,000 cocoa farmers to plant shade trees across their plantations. The result has been a spectacular 50% rise in yields,16 thanks to the return of a natural ecosystem that keeps soils well-nourished, retains water, and provides a healthy habitat for pollinators.
The biggest revaluation of the next century
For investors, the Ghana story is a clear example of the ‘nature premium’. In addition to the crop yield increase, the cocoa produced in the agro-forests now sells at a premium to buyers with zero-deforestation supply chain commitments. And thanks to their forest restoration efforts, those same farms also receive payments from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility – in effect, carbon credits for turning formerly degraded landscapes into net carbon sinks.
Increasingly, governments are now recognising the value of investing in nature. As part of the EU’s Green Deal, the ‘Biodiversity Strategy for 2030’ aims to cut the use of pesticides by 50%, to redirect national agricultural subsidies towards nature-positive farming practices, and to unlock EUR 20 billion in nature-based finance.17 In the US, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, a similar sum is being turned towards regenerative farming, in order to improve soil health and raise pollinator numbers.18
As governments around the world focus their financing on nature, and as corporates across all industries commit to nature-positive supply chains, new opportunities to invest in nature will emerge.
At Lombard Odier, we believe that nature is currently the world’s most underpriced asset. The demand for nature-positive, ‘regenerative’ commodities – those produced in harmony with nature, rather than at its expense – will drive the biggest revaluation of the next century. As it does, we will reverse the pollinator decline and kickstart nature’s engine back to full throttle.
1 Pollinator recognition by a keystone tropical plant | PNAS
2 The evolution of bat pollination: a phylogenetic perspective - PMC (nih.gov)
3 Lizards, mice, bats and other vertebrates are important pollinators too – The Ecological Society of America
4 Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers - ScienceDirect; Pollinators: first global risk index for species declines and effects on humanity (cam.ac.uk)
5 Biodiversity loss poses a fundamental risk to the global economy | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
6 https://www.audubon.org/content/how-create-hummingbird-friendly-yard
7 Gods, Wasps and Stranglers: The Secret History and Redemptive Future of Fig Trees, Mike Shanahan
8 Overview of Bee Pollination and Its Economic Value for Crop Production - PMC (nih.gov)
9 Why bees matter (fao.org)
10 Direct pesticide exposure of insects in nature conservation areas in Germany | Scientific Reports
11 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A2023%3A35%3AFIN&qid=1674555285177
12 Parallel declines in abundance of insects and insectivorous birds in Denmark over 22 years - Møller - 2019 - Ecology and Evolution - Wiley Online Library
13 Think of honeybees as ‘livestock’ not wildlife, argue experts | University of Cambridge
14 Sustainable avocados from Africa Kenya - Resilience Food Stories
15 Challenges in Cocoa Pollination: The Case of Côte d’Ivoire | IntechOpen; Flies are saving your chocolate cravings | Natural History Museum (nhm.ac.uk)
16 Climate Stories | Ghana Carbon Credits (worldbank.org)
17 Green Deal: Halving pesticide use by 2030 | EIP-AGRI (europa.eu); Biodiversity financing - Environment - European Commission (europa.eu)
18 How to Maximize IRA’s Investments in Farmers and Agriculture (nrdc.org)
Important information
This document is issued by Bank Lombard Odier & Co Ltd or an entity of the Group (hereinafter “Lombard Odier”). It is not intended for distribution, publication, or use in any jurisdiction where such distribution, publication, or use would be unlawful, nor is it aimed at any person or entity to whom it would be unlawful to address such a document. This document was not prepared by the Financial Research Department of Lombard Odier.
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