Animal pollinators are crucial for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem functioning, and human well-being. However, despite the support of various EU and national initiatives and the widely recognised benefits of pollination, many of the pressures on pollinators continue unabated. This has resulted in growing evidence of localised but significant pollination service deficit in crop pollination, as well as concerns that other communities may be approaching tipping points as key species decline. Because of the critical role that pollination plays in supporting diverse plant communities and, by extension, the animals that depend upon them, such losses may have significant impacts on wider ecosystems and ecosystem services, with further consequences for human societies.

Demand for animal-pollinated crops has led to significant intensification of production in many world regions. A major challenge in implementing effective pollinator conservation is engaging this diverse range of actors collectively. Measuring the values of pollinators and pollination has often been proposed as a key step towards addressing this problem by engaging actors in conservation.

Our mission

VALOR brings together interdisciplinary researchers, NGOs and businesses, with the aim to co-develop and demonstrate a systems-based approach to understanding, measuring and responding to changes in the benefits that pollinators provide to society and the economy. VALOR bases its approach on the specific needs of seven focal regions, to build a better understanding of the flow of pollination benefits across actors and make our methods, tools, databases and models visible and accessible.

VALOR’s interdisciplinary and multi-actor systems-based approach is designed to capture the full chain of direct and indirect impacts of pollinator shifts, from flowers, to ecosystems, crops, farm businesses, societies, value chains and human health and well-being. We will combine these approaches to forecast the resilience of different actors to pollinator shifts under a variety of different plausible future scenarios and adapt them into decision support tools, both of which will be co-developed with stakeholders.

VALOR is more than just great research. It's about working with people to make that research understandable and meaningful to everyone, and give them the tools to explore their relationship with nature themselves.

Tom Marshall, VALOR Communications Lead

Objectives

Co-developing a better understanding of stakeholder knowledge needs around pollinators.
Better understanding the dependence of society and the economy on pollinators by quantifying the extent of direct and indirect benefits of all pollinating animals through both crop and non-crop plants.
Measuring and modelling the cascading impacts of plant-pollinator networks on ecosystems and human well-being.
Mapping the extent to which different actors within biomass value chains, benefit from pollination services, and the consequences that unmitigated pollinator losses may have on economies and human health and nutrition.
Forecasting the resilience of pollinator networks and human benefits under future conditions.
Co-developing tools to engage and empower actors about pollinator conservation, with a variety of stakeholders from local to international scale.

About VALOR

A Horizon Europe project exploring the values and dependence of society on pollinators

Our mission

VALOR is more than just great research. It's about working with people to make that research understandable and meaningful to everyone, and give them the tools to explore their relationship with nature themselves.

Our approach

Objectives