The All Ireland Pollinator Plan 2021 – 2025

The All Ireland Pollinator Plan 2021 – 2025 is the second phase of this very successful project, a new five-year road map that aims to help bees, other pollinating insects and our wider biodiversity. This new plan is even more ambitious than the last.  One-third of our 98 wild bee species are threatened with extinction from the island of Ireland.  Wild bees and other insects are declining because we’ve drastically reduced the areas where they can nest and the amount of food our landscape provides for them. By the end of phase 1 of the All Ireland Pollinator Plan 2015 – 2020, all 81 actions which it contained had been completed. Pollinators are better off than they were in 2015, but they are still in difficulties and we need to do more. The new plan has more than doubled our goals – with 186 actions to help biodiversity. In the 2021 – 2025 phase, we want to encourage the restoration of more land for pollinators and other biodiversity. We will:

• Celebrate farmland biodiversity and improve awareness of how farmers can help
• Encourage more councils to manage their land in a way that better integrates people and biodiversity.
• Encourage new sectors to get involved, such as hospitals and nursing homes
• Focus more on helping rare species that are at risk of disappearing, like the Great Yellow Bumblebee
• Grow and support the networks of people helping across all sectors.
• Encourage more people to pledge their garden for pollinators, creating pitstops for hungry bees right across our landscape.

In this new phase, we also want to engage more widely and with new audiences. We will:

• Try to better explain how helping pollinators bring much wider benefits, particularly to our own health and wellbeing
• Cement Ireland’s position as a world leader, by establishing a ‘Pollinator Trail’ that identifies and celebrates excellent examples of restored pollinator habitat right across the island
• Support beekeepers in keeping healthy honey bees; but also, better stress that it is our wild bees that are in trouble, and that we need to halt those declines and create a balanced system with a range of pollinator types
• Ensure the Plan remains dynamic and effective, by identifying new research priorities so that our universities can continue to grow the evidence base to best support the initiative.

“We don’t want this to be a short-term, ‘trendy’ initiative. It is about fully normalising a better way of managing our whole landscape to permanently support our struggling biodiversity,” said Dr Úna FitzPatrick, Senior Ecologist in the National Biodiversity Data Centre, who chairs the Plan steering group and oversees its implementation. [FIBKA is a member of the All Ireland Pollinator Plan steering group. The new phase of the Plan will include special actions for beekeepers.]