HotBee - Can wild pollinators adapt or be adapted to a warming world?

Climate change is relentless and demands urgent need for informed, science-based action to mitigate far-reaching impacts on human livelihoods, ecosystems, and biodiversity.

We will contribute to fostering climate change-resilience by promoting sustainable management of natural resources, pollinators, and biodiversity through a set of experiments based around bees in the climate change-pollination nexus.

We will address three main issues:Can wild pollinators escape climate change-effects by advancing their phenology, or will future warming see the demise of some species?Will future pollinations services be synchronized with climate-resilient crops?

If not, is it possible to intervene to restore it?What is the scope for industrial solutions to bee decline and future pollination demands?We will address these main objectives in a bean cultivation framework.

Beans are increasingly important bee-pollinated crop in the global and regional agricultural landscape, because they are resilient to hot and dry climates and yet providing economic, environmental, and nutritional benefits recognized by the UN.

By resolving experimentally how climate change impacts species richness and performance in bean fields and how pollination services can be restored, we aim to provide intervention strategies to optimize future pollination services, including a range of farmer- and industrial-based management techniques.