LIFE BEEadapt: a pact for pollinator adaptation to climate change

Introduction

Climate change has multiple implications for organisms’ phenology, causing desynchronizations between pollinators and flowering periods that affect many pollinators’ populations and distribution. There is increasing evidence that climate change trends (especially when combined with other pressures) may increase extinction risk of several pollinator species, locally and globally threatening ecosystems resilience, rural economy, and food security.

Impacts of Climate Change

Homogenous and fragmented landscapes worsen climate change impacts on pollinators, preventing their adaptation to changing conditions. This calls for climate adaptation measures that enhance landscape connectivity and habitat heterogeneity at multiple spatial scales, locally increasing the variety of micro-climatic conditions.

Project Overview

LIFE BEEadapt puts pollinators at the heart of the design of adaptation measures by enhancing connectivity planning at national, regional, and local scales through a set of governance, programming, implementation, and environmental tools. These tools aim to preserve/increase areas with heterogeneous geophysical characteristics and vegetation structure, instead of addressing only land-use change impacts, as many conservation strategies and agro-environmental schemes do. This approach ultimately improves the climate resilience of territories.

Project Objectives

The project will:

• Provide an abacus of practices to design pollinators-oriented Green Infrastructure (GI) in rural, peri-urban, and urban areas.
• Carry out demonstration actions in 5 Italian target areas with different morphology, land uses, and management assets.
• Create a governance model improving public bodies’ administrative capacity on adaptation and involving farmers in GI design and management.
• Establish criteria for the payment of pollination-related ecosystem services and the inclusion of pollinators-oriented measures in planning tools, for replication of project results.
• Transfer to selected areas a protocol for pollinators-friendly adaptation and disseminate it in Italy and beyond.