By Minahil Makhdoom
ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam said that while honeybees play an unprecedented role towards achieving food security, environmental protection and balancing the nature, human-caused rapidly shifting and erratic weather patterns pose a grave risk to their very survival.
While addressing as a keynote speaker at the launching ceremony of the Prime Minister’s National Apiculture Programme under the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Programme (TBTTP) held here on Tuesday, he explained that with many wild bee species only able to survive in specific temperature ranges, global warming has placed today the global bee population in peril.
Spelling out about the drivers of the bee losses, Amin Aslam said that climate change leads to some flowers to bloom earlier or later than usual, leaving bees with fewer food sources at the onset of the seasons. Also, bees suffer habitat loss from development, abandoned farms and the dearth of bee-friendly flowers. Some colonies collapse due to plants and seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides, or harmful parasites like mites, he added.
“But, while bees are our most important pollinators, unfortunately the creatures populations are in decline,†he aggrieved. The decline of these pollinators is also linked with land-use change, spread of disease and agrochemical use,” he pointed out, referring to other environmental threats to bee populations in addition to global warming. To stave off this decline, Malik Amin Aslam suggested that controlling the use of chemicals in agriculture, adoption of sustainable land use methods, environmental conservation, boosting forest cover and mitigating climate altering carbon emissions can significantly improve pollinator resilience and help fight population losses for achieving the overall food security and restoring the nature’s balance.
“Conservation efforts need to address declines in all pollinators in terms of developing landscapes to support pollinator communities, not just honeybees,” he suggested. Nevertheless, there is pressing need for an over-arching, viable attempt to ameliorate pollinator decline through agri-environment schemes, using crop diversification, protection of natural habitat and establishing ecological focus areas such as wildflower strips,” the PM’s aide emphasized. Highlighting the role of bees in the nature, Malik Amin Aslam said that bees earn their reputation as busy workers by pollinating billions of plants each year, including millions of agricultural crops. “Thus, pollinators like bees play a key role in one out of every three bites of food we eat. Without them, many plants we rely on for food would die off,†he stressed.
It’s not just farm-grown fruits and vegetables that depend on the bee pollinators to thrive. Many species of wild plants depend on insect pollinators as well.
