“Climate chaos” has caused widespread losses of bumblebees across continents, according to scientists.
A new analysis shows the likelihood of a bee being found in any given place in Europe and North America has declined by a third since the 2000 s.
Climbing temperatures will increase cause declines, which are already more severe than previously thought, said researchers.
Bumblebees are key pollinators of many fruits, vegetables and wild plants.
Without them, some crops could fail, reducing food for humans and countless other species. Dr Tim Newbold of University College London (UCL ) said there had been some previous research showing that bumblebee distributions are moving northwards in Europe and North America, “as you’d expect with climate change”.
He added: “But this was the first time that we have been able to really tie local extinctions and colonisations of bumble bees to climate change, showing a really clear fingerprint of climate change in the declines that we’ve seen. “
Bumblebee declines are already more severe than previously thought, said lead researcher Peter Soroye of the University of Ottawa in Canada. “We’ve linked this to climate change – and more specifically to the extreme temperatures and the climate chaos that climate change is producing,” he said.
Jonathan Bridle and Alexandra van Rensburg of the University of Bristol described the findings as “alarming”. Commenting in the journal
Science , they said: “The new study adds to a growing body of evidence for alarming, widespread losses of biodiversity and for rates of global change that now exceed the critical limits of ecosystem resilience. ” There are around species of bumblebee in the world. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN), declines have been documented in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia, caused by a variety of threats that range from habitat loss and degradation to diseases and pesticide use.
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