Abstract/Summary

Evidence of declines in wild and managed pollinators and pollination services is increasingly being documented around the world. This has driven the development of a wide range of practical management and policy responses which were reviewed in the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) global assessment of ‘Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production’. We take 38 responses from this report as a basis to explore the importance of scale for the effective delivery of an intervention’s benefit to pollinators. We considered five scale categories: Spatial, the spatial scale at which the response is most effective; Temporal, the time scale over which the response is most effective; Actors, the number of actors needed for most effectively implementing a response; Social, the sphere of influence or motivation that determines an effective response; and, Sector, the sector(s) of society which should be involved to increase effectiveness. Each scale category was split into multiple levels and we scored each in terms of how important they were for determining the effectiveness of a given response option. Using our combined scores, we aim to explore general trends and raise awareness around the main issues relating to the importance of scale, with illustrated examples from the literature. We show how scales have impacted on the effectiveness of interventions and provide recommendations on how to improve scale matching when planning a response action. While the relative importance of scales and levels for effectiveness was heterogeneous across response options, there were some general patterns. Interventions were only effective when targeted over the right spatial scales over a sufficient period of time and involved all relevant social and sectoral groups and actors.