Insect and Pollinator Decline
The animals that pollinate a third of our food are disappearing.
Severity score
50.1
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Insect biomass has fallen sharply in monitored regions, driven by pesticides, habitat loss, light pollution and warming. Around three quarters of leading food crops depend at least partly on animal pollination, and managed hives cannot substitute at scale.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
10Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
66People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
54Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
88Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
66Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.