HORIZON EUROPE AGRI4POL Project: Promoting sustainable agriculture for pollinators
- Type Project
- Status Firmado
- Execution 2025 -2028
- Assigned Budget 6.000.000,00 €
- Scope Europeo
- Main source of financing Horizonte Europa 2021-2027
- Project website Proyecto AGRI4POL
Pollinators play a crucial role in global agriculture; however, they face serious threats such as habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change, which jeopardize food security and ecosystem health.
In this context, the EU-funded AGRI4POL project will transform agriculture from a burden to pollinators to a boon for biodiversity. By deepening the scientific understanding of the relationships between agricultural systems and pollinators, AGRI4POL will identify crop varieties that attract and sustain these vital species.
The project also explores how agricultural practices and landscape characteristics can optimize pollinator services. Through collaboration with farmers, policymakers, and stakeholders, AGRI4POL seeks to promote pollinator-friendly practices, in line with sustainability goals and contributing to the European Green Deal.
Threats to pollinators and the pollination services that support agriculture and provide benefits to people are a global issue. AGRI4POL's ambition is to help agriculture shift from being a pressure on pollinators to becoming a positive force for managing and restoring pollinator biodiversity, crop pollination services, and co-benefits for ecosystems and people.
To achieve this transition toward more pollinator-friendly agricultural systems and value chains, AGRI4POL will advance the scientific understanding of the relationships between the agricultural system and pollinators, from the crop gene to the agroecosystem. By evaluating the genetic basis of crop floral traits that attract and reward crop pollinators, we will identify suitable candidate crop lines for generating future pollinator-smart varieties.
We will study how pollinator-crop relationships are modified over space and time by the diversity and rotation of crop species and varieties, by ecological infrastructure (EI)—which includes landscape features and non-agricultural habitats—and by future climate or land-use change. Synthesizing this information from the genetic to the agroecosystem scale will allow us to provide integrated recommendations to optimize landscapes for crop pollination, pollinator biodiversity, and multiple ecosystem benefits.
AGRI4POL research will be framed and supported by early and sustained multi-stakeholder engagement along agri-food chains to ensure its relevance and the acceptability of management options for farmers and society. This multi-stakeholder approach will also allow for the assessment of socioeconomic and political barriers and opportunities affecting the feasibility and adoption of pollinator-friendly agriculture at subnational, European, and international levels.
Therefore, AGRI4POL will demonstrate to farmers, agri-food stakeholders, policymakers, and the general public the importance of pollinator-friendly agriculture for food security and sustainability goals (EC Green Deal, Nature Restoration Act; UN SDGs).
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