Why bees are critical for achieving sustainable development

Background

Bees are the most dominant group of pollinators and they may hold a key to achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They have a great potential for promoting agricultural success, providing people with crop pollination services. However bee populations are declining due to habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change. Knowing the extent to which bees contribute to SDGs  and identifying their critical roles within SDGs is important for conservation targeting.

Conclusions and Takeaways

Bees contribute to the quantity and quality of food, nutrition and medicine, biofuels, and healthy ecosystems. They also provide a basis for fostering inclusive communities, conserving and restoring forests, economic growth, and further innovations. Both domesticated and wild bees are highly important to these processes and the decline in populations greatly threatens the goals of the SDGs. Appropriate natural resource management techniques are necessary to for people to continue to benefit from all of the services bees offer.