Europe risks a genuine pollinator crisis — and one that runs well beyond honeybees — according to a white paper released 22 June 2026 by 135 researchers drawn from eight separate Horizon Europe-funded research consortia, warning that fragmented, sometimes contradictory EU policy is itself a major barrier to reversing wild-pollinator decline.
The white paper
Titled “Towards pollinator stewardship in all policies: Policy incoherence in the EU is a major barrier to pollinator restoration,” the paper (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20715670) was produced jointly by the Butterfly, VALOR, PollinERA, WildPosh, AGRI4POL, ProPollSoil, RestPoll, and Safeguard projects — eight consortia funded under separate Horizon Europe grants (project numbers 101181930, 101181169, 101135005, 101135238, 101181146, 101219108, 101082102, and 101003476, respectively) spanning universities and research institutes across the EU. Lead author Jeroen van der Sluijs, a professor at the University of Bergen, has highlighted a recurring theme of the paper: policy and public attention have concentrated heavily on managed honeybees, while wild pollinators — solitary bees, hoverflies, moths, and butterflies, many of which are more effective pollinators for particular crops than honeybees — are declining with comparatively little coordinated policy response.
Why “policy incoherence” is the headline finding
Rather than proposing a single new regulation, the white paper’s central diagnosis is structural: pollinator-relevant policy is currently split across agriculture, environment, chemicals regulation, research funding, trade, finance, spatial planning, and education, with no consistent mechanism forcing those siloed policy areas to account for their effects on pollinators together. A pesticide-approval decision, a farm-subsidy rule, and a land-use plan can each individually clear their own regulatory bar while collectively working against pollinator recovery. The paper sets out 15 science-based recommendations aimed at closing that coordination gap, and is intended to directly inform the European Commission’s Pollinators Initiative, the EU’s existing policy framework for reversing pollinator decline.
The funding and authorship model behind it
The paper is a notable example of coordinated, funder-driven science communication: eight independently-funded Horizon Europe consortia, each with its own research scope and grant number, choosing to publish jointly rather than issue eight separate sets of findings. That structure lets 135 researchers speak with one voice on a cross-cutting policy diagnosis that no single consortium’s grant scope would have covered alone — a model other multi-consortium Horizon Europe research communities may increasingly draw on when a finding is genuinely bigger than any one funded project.
