Ecological intensification aims to increase crop productivity by enhancing biodiversity and associated ecosystem services, while minimizing the use of synthetic inputs and cropland expansion. Policies to promote ecological intensification have emerged in different countries, but they are still scarce and vary widely across regions. Here we propose ten policy targets that governments can follow for ecological intensification.
Multiple anthropogenic challenges threaten nature's contributions to human well-being. Agricultural expansion and conventional intensification are degrading biodiversity and ecosystem functions, thereby undermining the natural foundations on which agriculture is itself built. Averting the worst effects of global environmental change and assuring ecosystem benefits, requires a transformation of agriculture. Alternative agricultural systems to conventional intensification exist, ranging from adjustments to efficiency (e.g. sustainable intensification) to a redesign (e.g. ecological intensification, climate-smart agriculture) of the farm management system. These alternatives vary in their reliance on nature or technology, the level of systemic change required to operate, and impacts on biodiversity, landscapes and agricultural production. Different socio-economic, ecological and political settings mean there is no universal solution, instead there are a suite of interoperable practices that can be adapted to different contexts to maximise efficiency, sustainability and resilience. Social, economic, technological and demographic issues will influence the form of sustainable agriculture and effects on landscapes and biodiversity. These include: (1) the socio-technical-ecological architecture of agricultural and food systems and trends such as urbanisation in affecting the mode of production, diets, lifestyles and attitudes; (2) emerging technologies, such as gene editing, synthetic biology and 3D bioprinting of meat; and (3) the scale or state of the existing farm system, especially pertinent for smallholder agriculture. Agricultural transformation will require multifunctional landscape planning with cross-sectoral and participatory management to avoid unintended consequences and ultimately depends on people's capacity to accept new ways of operating in response to the current environmental crisis.
Mitigating pollinator declines in agriculturally dominated landscapes to safeguard pollination services requires the involvement of farmers and their willingness to adopt pollinator-friendly management. However, farmer knowledge, perceptions, and actions to support on-farm pollinators and their alignment with science-based knowledge and recommendations are rarely evaluated. To close this knowledge gap, we interviewed 560 farmers from 11 countries around the world, cultivating at least one of four widely grown pollinator-dependent crops (apple, avocado, kiwifruit, oilseed rape). We particularly focused on non-bee crop pollinators which, despite being important pollinators of many crops, received less research attention than bees. We found that farmers perceived bees to be more important pollinators than other flower-visiting insects. However, around 75% of the farmers acknowledged that non-bees contributed to the pollination of their crops, seeing them as additional pollinators rather than substitutes for bees. Despite farmers rating their own observations as being most important in how they perceived the contribution of different crop pollinator taxa, their perception aligned closely with results from available scientific studies across crops and countries. Farmer perceptions were also linked with their pollinator management practices, e.g. farmers who used managed bees for crop pollination services (more than half the farmers) rated these managed bees as particularly important. Interestingly, their willingness to establish wildflower strips or manage hedgerows to enhance pollinator visitation was linked to their ecological knowledge of non-bees or to government subsidies. Farmers adapted practices to enhance pollination services depending on the crop, which indicates an understanding of differences in the pollination ecology of crops. Almost half of the farmers had changed on-farm pollination management in the past 10 years and farm practices differed greatly between countries. This suggests integrated crop ...
