Putting a Price on Pollinators

Bees are important, the argument goes, because they flit about from flower to flower, picking up pollen from one plant and inadvertently depositing it on another. In other words, they facilitate plant sex. And plant sex is how you get fruits and nuts…lots of the tasty things we humans like to eat. If the bees disappear, so too do apples and avocados and pecan pie.

This sort of argument relies on a concept known as “ecosystem services,” a concept that’s become increasingly important in divisive discussions regarding biodiversity conservation. Some conservationists insist that biodiversity and nature ought to be conserved for its own sake; others argue that a more effective strategy is to calculate the economic impacts biodiversity conservation would have. Armed with that sort of information, it may then become easier to motivate conservation-related policies. In other words, conservation for our sake.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications this week, a massive group of researchers led by David Kleijn of the Netherlands-based Center for Ecosystem Studies, come down clearly on the “for its own sake” side. But they do it by taking an empirical look at how an ecosystem services approach plays out when considering pollinators.