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Climate Change and Pollinators

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Abstract

This chapter describes how the climate change is potentially the most severe threat to pollinator biodiversity. Mounting evidence demonstrates that there have already been biotic responses to the relatively small climate changes that have occurred this century. Pollinators such as birds, bees, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, beetles bats and even mosquitoes are essential for food production because they transfer pollen between seed plants-impacting 35% of the world’s crops. Along with providing an essential service to human populations, pollinators also have a key role in maintaining other ecosystem services including ensuring biodiversity and helping Nature to adjust to external threats such as climate change. The “pollination crisis” that is evident in declines of honeybees and native bees worldwide is due to disruption of critical balance between the two mutually interacting organisms. Anthropogenic climate change is widely expected to drive species extinct by hampering individual survival and reproduction, by reducing the amount and accessibility of suitable habitat, or by eliminating other organisms that are essential to the species in question. The potential disruption of a ubiquitous mutualistic interaction of terrestrial habitats, that between plants and their animal pollinators, via climate change is at risk.

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  1. Division of Entomology Faculty of Agriculture, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Main Campus Chatha, Jammu, 180009, India

    Dharam P. Abrol

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Abrol, D.P. (2012). Climate Change and Pollinators. In: Pollination Biology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1942-2_15

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