SAVING THE SMALL THINGS THAT RUN THE PLANET

Dr Catherine M Jones, Pollinator Officer, Buglife 

Catherine has worked for Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust – since 2017 when she joined to deliver the Urban Buzz Project in Leeds. She moved to her current role of Pollinator Officer in April 2019 and represents Buglife at Defra’s Pollinator Advisory Steering Group, at the Wildlife and Countryside Link – Agriculture group, at the Farm Wildlife partnership and at Nature Friendly Farming Network advisory partners meetings.

Catherine was awarded a PhD by Royal Holloway, University of London in 2013, for her work on bumblebees. Following a move to Yorkshire, Catherine worked at the University of Leeds on the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) National Pollinator and Pollination Monitoring Framework (NPPMF) project developing the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (PoMS).

Catherine is fascinated by the natural world, particularly insects, and contributes to a number of citizen science projects including CEH’s UK PoMS flower-insect timed (FIT) counts and 1km square surveys.

Catherine’s talk introduced Buglife, the Invertebrate Conservation Trust, Europe’s only conservation organisation devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates, whose strapline is ‘saving the small things that run the planet.

With insect populations in crisis, she briefly outlined how Buglife’s No Insectinction (https://www.buglife.org.uk/campaigns/no-insectinction/) campaign aims to make room for insects to thrive, create safe spaces for insects and encourage everyone to have friendlier relationships with insects.

She talked about the importance of pollinating insects, the food and shelter that pollinators need and how Buglife’s  B-Lines, a network of wildflower-rich “insect superhighways” (https://www.buglife.org.uk/our-work/b-lines/), will help to fulfil those needs – and enable pollinators to move across the countryside.

The UNEP report confirms that insects provide a broad range of services to people, and Catherine highlighted the links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve ‘a better and more sustainable future’ and to address ‘climate change’ and ‘environmental degradation’.

Finally, Catherine suggested actions that everyone could take to help Buglife reverse insect declines and prevent insect extinctions, including create a wildflower-rich habitat for pollinators – and record it on the B-Lines map.

This talk covered UN SDGs 3, 6, 13, 14, 15 and 17.