Conference Agenda

There is a critical gap in macro-economic modelling, namely the lack of representation of ecosystems and biodiversity. These provide services such as pollination, soil erosion and flood control, which contribute a significant proportion to global GDP. Their omission leads to inaccurate long-term socioeconomic projections, particularly under accelerating environmental change.

This study addresses this gap by explicitly integrating ecosystem services and biodiversity loss into long-term socioeconomic projections under climate change. Building on the European ecosystem accounting standards (SEEA-EA), we evaluate the impact of the decline in available pollination services across the EU using (1) observed trends in wild pollinator populations from European indexes as the EU Butterfly Index and (2) projected declines derived from state-of-the-art climate-driven species distribution models (SDMs) for key pollinator taxa (wild bees, hoverflies, butterflies, beetles). The ecological projections are spatially matched with crop cultivation areas from FAO Cropgrids and pollination dependency ratios for 103 european crops to estimate agricultural productivity losses at high spatial resolution under several climate scenarios (RCP2.6; 4.5; 6.0; 7.0 and 8.5) and socioeconomic pathways (SSP1; 2; 3; 5) up to 2070. These biophysical impacts are translated into second-order economic shocks using a regionalized version of the ICES Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model (GTAP11), enabling assessment of macroeconomic consequences at NUTS2-level resolution. A conservation policy scenario is also evaluated, representing the implementation of main EU conservation policies available to date (Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Nature Restoration Law, Natura2000 network). This scenario assumes stabilization and restoration of pollination potential to match 1990 levels in the absence of climate change, reflecting the anticipated effects of EU biodiversity policies through habitat restoration, pesticide reduction, and protected area expansion.

Results highlight the spatial heterogeneity of pollination decline and its disproportionate effects on pollinator-dependent crops across regions, revealing critical vulnerabilities in the EU agricultural systems. Although the aggregate impact on EU GDP remains modest, preliminary results indicate that economic impacts on the agricultural sector could reach up to –2.52% by 2080 relative to a no-climate-change scenario, with several regions experiencing losses exceeding –5%. Sectoral estimates show that numerous regions may face reductions of 9% to 22% of sectoral GDP in the case of Vegetables, fruit, nuts, Oil seeds and Other crops sectors, with effects propagating also to sectors not strictly dependent on pollination. Overall, excluding additional co-benefits such as flood control and soil-erosion mitigation, the conservation policy does not appear cost-efficient, as projected economic costs slightly outweigh the benefits associated with net increases in land productivity.

By stepping into the integration of biodiversity loss within climate-change macroeconomic impact assessment, this study delivers the first long-term evaluation of pollination impacts derived from a multi-model, multi-scenario SDM ensemble. The proposed framework provides a reproducible basis for embedding biodiversity dynamics into economic planning and for informing nature-restoration and climate-adaptation policies.