Society
When Pollinators Vanish, Children Go Hungry—Here’s the Proof
A landmark study has, for the first time, traced a direct line from the collapse of wild insect pollinators to the malnutrition and poverty of farming families — reframing biodiversity loss as a global public health emergency.
Two billion. That is how many people on this planet eat what smallholder farmers grow. Not what agri-industrial combines harvest, not what commodity markets trade — what families with small plots of land pull from the soil, season after season, with the tools and seeds and knowledge they have. Two billion people. And a significant share of what keeps those harvests coming, what puts vitamins into the food and income into the household, has no name on any payroll, files no tax return, and has never once been thanked.
It is insects. Wild insects — bees, hoverflies, moths, beetles — moving flower to flower across millions of smallholder fields, doing work that no machine replicates and no subsidy replaces. Pollinator decline is dismantling that system quietly, field by field, season by season. A study published today in Nature, led by researchers at the University of Bristol, has for the first time traced exactly what that loss costs — not in abstracted ecosystem valuations, but in the vitamin A missing from a child’s diet, in the folate a pregnant woman never gets, in the farm income that does not arrive at the end of a harvest. The number at the end of that calculation is not a projection or a model. It is a measurement. And it is arresting.
Insect pollinators, the study found, are responsible for 44% of the farming income of the households tracked, and contribute more than 20% of dietary intake of vitamin A, folate and vitamin E — three nutrients whose deficiency is already linked to stunted child growth, weakened immunity and higher rates of disease. When pollinators vanish, the families don’t just grow less food. They grow less nutritious food, earn less money and become more vulnerable to illness. The cycle reinforces itself, downward.
Ten Villages, One Year, and a Chain of Evidence
The study centred on ten smallholder farming villages and their surrounding landscapes in Nepal. Over the course of a year, the research team — drawn from universities and non-governmental organisations across Nepal, the United Kingdom, the United States and Finland — tracked three things simultaneously: which insects were visiting which crops, what those crops yielded and how nutritious they were, and what the farming families were actually eating and earning.
It is, in structural terms, the kind of study that is very hard to pull off. Most research on pollinators stops at the field boundary — counting bee visits, measuring fruit set, estimating yield differentials. This one kept going, all the way to the dinner table and the household ledger. That continuity of evidence is what makes it significant.
The picture that emerged was not abstract or statistical. It was human. Over half the children in the study villages were too short for their age — a condition that goes by the clinical name of stunting and signals not just poor growth but compromised brain development, reduced immunity and diminished life prospects. The underlying cause, as the researchers documented it, was diet. And that diet depended, in ways the families could not easily see or control, on the insects working their fields.
Pollinator Decline: The Hidden Hunger Nobody Is Counting
There is a term in public health circles for the condition that the Nepal families illustrate: hidden hunger. It describes not the obvious, acute starvation that makes headlines, but the chronic, silent insufficiency of vitamins and minerals that undermines health even when enough calories are being consumed. A quarter of the global population currently suffers from it. It is, by most measures, one of the largest sources of preventable illness on the planet, and it is almost entirely invisible in the way society keeps score of environmental damage.
When a species goes extinct, when a forest is cleared, when an insect population crashes — the accounting of loss is typically measured in biodiversity metrics, in ecosystem service valuations, or in the emotional register of what is no longer there to see. It is almost never measured in folate deficiency, in children’s height-for-age charts, in the likelihood of a farming family falling into debt after a bad harvest.
That is what this study changes. It is not the first to establish that pollinator decline matters for nutrition in the abstract. But it is the first to demonstrate, with tracked data from real communities over a real year, the size and mechanism of the effect — and to show that the effect flows not just through calories but through the specific micronutrients that are hardest to replace.
Biodiversity as Medicine
Planetary Health — the field Dr Myers directs at Johns Hopkins — proceeds from a deceptively simple premise: human health and ecological health are not separate subjects. They are the same subject, studied from different ends. The degradation of natural systems is not a background condition to human development; it is one of the primary mechanisms by which human health is undermined.
That claim has long had intuitive force. What the Bristol study on pollinator decline provides is something more demanding: empirical evidence at the household level. It is one thing to argue that biodiversity loss will eventually compromise food security in a generalised way. It is another to show, village by village, season by season, that the decline in the bee community visiting a particular set of crops reduces particular vitamins in particular families’ diets by a measurable amount.
The phrasing matters. Biodiversity is not a luxury. In policy conversations, the language of luxury — or alternatively, of long-term concern — has frequently served to push ecological questions down the agenda. If the relationship between pollinator health and child health is as direct as this study finds, that framing becomes harder to sustain.
What Goes When the Bees Go
It is worth being specific about the nutritional stakes. Vitamin A deficiency impairs vision, particularly in low light, and compromises the immune system’s ability to fight infections that would otherwise be routine. Folate deficiency during pregnancy causes neural tube defects in developing foetuses, among other effects. Vitamin E is a key antioxidant, and its deficiency is associated with neurological damage and weakened immune function. These are not marginal health concerns. They sit near the top of the global burden of preventable disease.
The crops most dependent on animal pollination — fruits, many vegetables, pulses — are also, not coincidentally, among the most concentrated sources of these particular nutrients. A diet from which pollinator-dependent produce has been reduced or removed can look adequate in calorie terms while being profoundly inadequate in micronutrient terms. The families studied in Nepal were, in effect, already living that deficit, in a context where pollinator diversity is declining.
Globally, insect populations have been under sustained pressure for decades. Pesticide use, habitat loss, monoculture farming, climate change and artificial light at night have all been implicated in declines that researchers have called, in some cases, ecological collapse. The mechanisms are various; the direction of travel is consistent.
The Good News: Reversible by Design
The research is, in its implications, genuinely alarming. But the researchers are also at pains to emphasise something that is easy to miss in the headline findings: the relationship between pollinators and nutrition runs in both directions. If pollinator decline causes nutritional harm, pollinator recovery can produce nutritional gains. And the actions required are not exotic.
Planting wildflowers at field margins. Reducing pesticide inputs. Keeping native bee colonies. These are the kinds of changes that do not require new technology or large capital investment. They require farmers to understand what is happening in their fields at a level of detail most have not previously been given reason to consider. The researchers are already working on that — translating their findings into practical guidance and working with local organisations, government partners and farmers in Nepal to implement changes on the ground.
The approach is now informing Nepal’s emerging National Pollinator Strategy, an effort to make pollinator-friendly practices a standard part of everyday agriculture rather than a specialist conservation concern. The researchers report that farmers who have adopted even modest changes are already seeing improvements in crop yields, income and nutrition — a feedback loop that runs in the direction of health rather than away from it.
A Framework That Travels
Nepal is not an isolated case. Two billion people around the world depend on smallholder farming. Many of them face the same combination of circumstances: high dependence on pollinator-sensitive crops, limited dietary alternatives, micronutrient deficiencies that are already entrenched and ecosystems under stress. The findings from ten Nepali villages do not translate automatically to every agricultural context, but the framework — the method of tracing connections from insects to income to nutrition — does.
Diets even in industrialised countries still depend on pollinators and the ecosystems that sustain global agriculture. The buffer of wealth — the ability to import, substitute, supplement — is larger in wealthy countries, but it is not unlimited, and it does not protect the most economically vulnerable people even within those countries.
The lesson from this research on pollinator decline is less a specific warning about Nepal and more a methodological call to arms: to start measuring the connections that have, until now, been assumed or asserted but rarely demonstrated. When those connections are demonstrated, the case for protecting what remains of insect diversity becomes something different — not a moral preference or an aesthetic value, but a documented precondition for human health.
The Stakes
A quarter of the world’s people are living with hidden hunger. Over half the children in ten Nepali villages are stunted. Forty-four percent of the farming income in those communities flows, invisibly, through the wings of insects that nobody counted or protected until researchers started looking. The insects are in decline.
The study’s authors are careful, as scientists should be, to describe what they found and what it implies rather than what must be done. But the shape of the implication is not obscure. The fabric of life — the phrase Dr Myers uses — is not an abstraction. It is the thing that puts vitamins in a child’s diet and money in a family’s pocket. Tear large enough holes in it, and the consequences are not primarily ecological. They are medical. They are economic. They are, in the most direct sense, human. That’s why the new findings on pollinator decline matter.
The bees were always doing the work. We just weren’t watching closely enough to see it — or to understand what we stood to lose.
Society
How a South Indian Startup Is Reimagining Agriculture From the Sky
From flood-ravaged fields in Kerala to precision farming systems powered by drones, Fuselage Innovations is rethinking agriculture through data, efficiency, and real-time intelligence.
Drone technology in agriculture is rapidly changing how farmers monitor crops, manage resources and improve productivity. A South Indian startup is now using aerial innovation and precision farming tools to reshape agriculture from the sky
In 2018, catastrophic floods swept across South Indian state of Kerala, submerging farmland and leaving behind more than visible damage. When the waters receded, they revealed a deeper crisis—soil chemistry had changed, salinity had increased, and farming systems that had sustained communities for generations no longer behaved the same way.
For many farmers, the land had become unfamiliar.
For Devan Chandrasekharan, an aeronautical engineer with roots in farming, this moment marked a turning point.
“That moment made it clear that agriculture needed more than incremental change,” he says. “It needed a different way of understanding what’s happening in the field.”
Today, as co-founder of Fuselage Innovations, a Kerala-headquartered agritech company with operations expanding across southern India and early international pilots, Devan is part of a new wave of innovators rethinking agriculture through technology.
Drone Technology in Agriculture: From Fields to Flight Paths
Modern agriculture is increasingly shaped by data. But while satellite systems offer scale, they often lack immediacy. Cloud cover, delays, and low resolution limit their usefulness in time-sensitive decisions.
“In farming, timing is everything,” Devan notes. “If you cannot act at the right moment, even the best data loses its value.”
Fuselage Innovations addresses this gap using drones equipped with multispectral sensors, capable of capturing real-time, high-resolution data directly from the field. These systems detect early signs of stress—nutrient deficiencies, pest risks, or water imbalances—long before they become visible.
Farming as a Predictive System
The company’s approach goes beyond aerial imaging. It is built around a stage-wise model that tracks crop growth from early development to harvest, linking each phase to targeted interventions.
This transforms farming from a reactive process into a predictive one.
“Instead of responding to visible damage, we can identify stress signals early and intervene precisely,” Devan says. “That changes the entire economics of farming.”
The results are significant. Field applications have shown yield increases of up to 35 percent, alongside a reduction of nearly 50 percent in pesticide and fertiliser use. Precision spraying has also cut input volumes dramatically—from 150–200 litres per acre to just 10–15 litres—reducing both costs and environmental impact.
Scaling Beyond Boundaries
While the company’s early work was rooted in Kerala, its reach has expanded into Tamil Nadu and other parts of India, with pilot projects now extending to international markets such as Canada.
“Farming challenges may vary across regions, but the need for efficiency, sustainability, and better decision-making is universal,” Devan says.
Yet adoption remains a challenge. Farming is inherently risk-sensitive, and new technologies are often met with caution. To address this, the company initially offered its services free of cost, allowing farmers to see results before committing.
“Trust is the biggest barrier,” Devan says. “Farmers need to see the impact on their own fields before they adopt something new.”
The Future from Above
As climate pressures intensify and resource constraints deepen, agriculture is entering a new phase—one where data and precision will define productivity.
“Technology alone cannot solve agriculture,” Devan emphasises. “But when it is aligned with the realities of farmers and ecosystems, it can become a powerful tool for transformation.”
What began in the aftermath of a flood has now evolved into a model for the future—where farming is not just guided by tradition, but informed by intelligence.
Because the future of agriculture may not lie only in the soil—but in how we see it from above.
Society
The Coal Paradox: More Coal Plants, Less Coal Power
A new Global Energy Monitor report shows global coal capacity rising in 2025 even as coal-fired electricity generation declines amid rapid renewable energy growth.
The world is building more coal plants, but using less coal than before. That contradiction lies at the centre of a new report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), an international organisation that tracks energy infrastructure and the global shift toward cleaner power.
According to GEM, whose databases and research are widely used by institutions including the IPCC, IEA, UNEP and the World Bank, countries are continuing to expand coal power infrastructure even as coal’s role in electricity generation weakens globally.
The latest edition of GEM’s Boom and Bust 2026 report found that global coal power capacity grew by 3.5% in 2025, while coal-fired electricity generation declined by 0.6%. The report describes the trend as a major structural shift in the global energy system, where coal remains politically important in several countries even as renewable energy increasingly replaces it in practice.
China and India Drive Coal Growth
The contradiction is most visible in China and India, the world’s two largest coal consumers. Both countries commissioned large amounts of new coal capacity in 2025, even as coal generation declined because of record additions in solar and wind power.
China expanded coal capacity by 6% in 2025, while coal-fired generation fell by 1.2%. India recorded a similar pattern, with coal capacity increasing by 3.8% even as coal generation dropped by 2.9%.
The report suggests that coal’s decline is becoming increasingly durable despite global energy uncertainties, including geopolitical tensions affecting fuel supply routes such as the Strait of Hormuz. Renewable energy expansion has continued rapidly enough to reduce coal’s role in meeting new electricity demand.
Christine Shearer, Project Manager of GEM’s Global Coal Plant Tracker, described the trend as a defining paradox of the global energy transition.
“In 2025, the world built more coal and used it less,” she said. She added that 95% of all coal plant construction is now concentrated in China and India, even as both countries expand renewable energy fast enough to displace coal generation.
China’s Coal Pipeline Continues to Surge
China remained the dominant force in global coal expansion during 2025. The country recorded a record 161.7 GW of new and revived coal projects, while more than 500 GW of coal-fired capacity is currently under development.
The report warned that if these projects move ahead, China could remain locked into years of additional coal use throughout its 15th Five-Year Plan period from 2026 to 2030, despite official commitments to reduce coal consumption during the same timeframe.
India Expands Coal While Renewables Accelerate
India is also continuing major coal expansion plans. The country recorded 27.9 GW of new and revived coal proposals in 2025. Overall, India now has more than 107 GW of coal capacity in pre-construction planning and another 23.5 GW already under construction.
The Indian government has announced plans to add 100 GW of new coal capacity over the next seven years, even as renewable energy growth continues at record pace. In 2025, non-fossil fuel sources crossed the milestone of accounting for more than half of India’s installed electricity capacity.
Coal Development Shrinks Outside Asia
Outside China and India, coal development is shrinking rapidly. Only 32 countries were proposing or building new coal plants in 2025, down from 38 countries the previous year and less than half the 75 countries pursuing coal expansion in 2014.
Coal construction activity outside China and India accounted for just 5% of global coal construction capacity in 2025, marking a record low and highlighting how geographically concentrated coal development has become.
Several regions also made notable progress away from coal. Latin America achieved “No New Coal” status in 2025, while South Korea committed to a complete coal phaseout.
Türkiye, which is preparing to host COP31, now has only one active coal plant proposal remaining, compared with more than 70 proposed projects in 2015.
Delayed Coal Retirements Raise Concerns
The report also found that retirement plans for existing coal plants are slowing in several regions. Nearly 70% of coal-fired units scheduled for retirement globally in 2025 failed to retire as planned.
In the European Union, many delays were linked to energy security concerns that emerged during the 2022–23 energy crisis. In the United States, several ageing coal plants remained operational because of direct government interventions aimed at maintaining grid reliability.
Indonesia continued expanding its coal fleet, which grew by 7% in 2025, largely driven by captive coal plants supporting nickel and aluminium processing industries.
South Asia and Southeast Asia Show Mixed Trends
Elsewhere in South Asia, Pakistan rapidly expanded distributed solar energy, helping stabilise its electricity system against volatile fossil fuel markets. Bangladesh, meanwhile, continues to face fuel supply and technical challenges linked to its fossil-fuel-based power sector.
Across Southeast Asia outside Indonesia, coal commissioning declined for the third consecutive year. However, disruptions in regional gas supplies during 2026 led some countries to rely more heavily on existing coal infrastructure as a temporary backup source.
In Africa, new coal proposals remain limited and are mainly concentrated in Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Renewable Energy Reshapes the Global Energy Transition
The report concludes that coal is no longer expanding as a universally accepted solution for rising electricity demand. Instead, coal development is increasingly concentrated in a small number of countries, even as renewable energy demonstrates its ability to meet growing demand more efficiently and sustainably.
Society
India Built the Pipes. Now It Needs Better Water Data
JalSoochak is helping strengthen rural water delivery in India by turning paper-based records into real-time data for faster monitoring and response.
>> Rural water delivery in India has expanded rapidly under the Jal Jeevan Mission. But ensuring that water actually reaches homes every day now depends on better data, real-time monitoring, and systems like JalSoochak.
India built the pipes. Now comes the harder part.
Under the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM), more than 1.5 crore rural households have been connected to piped water supply — a number that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But connection is not the same as service. The pipe in the ground tells you nothing about whether water came out of the tap this morning, in what quantity, or whether the source feeding it is under stress.
That gap — between infrastructure built and service delivered — is where India’s rural water systems are now being tested. And it is a gap that turns, fundamentally, on data.
Why Rural Water Delivery Depends on Better Data
Pump operators and Jal Mitras are the ones who know. They manage supply cycles, monitor pumps, and record water delivery across thousands of villages every day. But in most states, those records live in paper registers. They cannot be verified, compared across districts, or acted on quickly. By the time a problem surfaces through the usual channels, it has often been festering for weeks. Engineers and administrators are left reconciling inconsistent figures instead of responding to the thing that actually went wrong.
Arghyam, a Bengaluru-based philanthropic organisation founded by Rohini Nilekani, has been working on this problem. In partnership with Assam’s Public Health Engineering Department (PHED), it developed JalSoochak (Water indicator) — a platform designed to make frontline water delivery measurable, verifiable, and useful, all the way up the system.
How JalSoochak Is Transforming Rural Water Delivery
“Since the expansion of rural water infrastructure, understanding what is actually happening on the ground at scale has remained difficult. JalSoochak addresses this by enabling frontline workers to capture a simple image as evidence of water supply, while also giving Jal Mitras a verifiable record of their service delivery and attendance,” said Kailash Karthik, Secretary, Public Health Engineering Department, Government of Assam and Mission Director, Jal Jeevan Mission Assam.
The tool itself is straightforward. A frontline worker photographs a meter reading on their mobile phone. The image is processed using AI, the user verifies the reading, and it is logged as a daily record. What used to be a handwritten entry in a register — easily disputed, easily lost — becomes a time-stamped, verifiable data point that engineers, block-level officers, and state administrators can all see and act on.
Accumulated over months, those daily records start to show things that no single entry would. A supply dip that recurs every fortnight. A pump whose readings are quietly declining. A source under pressure before anyone has formally flagged it. Problems get caught earlier, and the people responsible for fixing them have the evidence they need to act.
How Assam Is Digitising Rural Water Delivery
The numbers from Assam are substantial. More than 16,500 pump operators now use JalSoochak, collectively logging over 20 lakh readings. Together, those entries account for more than 37,600 million litres of water supply recorded.
Assam also made something else clear: what works in one state will not simply work everywhere. Each state has its own administrative logic, its own infrastructure, its own ways of capturing supply data. JalSoochak had to be rebuilt to absorb that variation rather than ignore it.
The platform now supports multiple modes of input — bulk flow meters, electric meter readings, pump operation duration, IoT devices, and manual entries. It works in local languages. Rather than running parallel to existing government systems, it is built to plug into them, so the data flows to where decisions are actually made, without creating extra work for anyone in the chain.
“JalSoochak is not just a technology platform. It is an attempt to strengthen service delivery to ensure that the investments made in rural water systems translate into reliable services for people. The journey from Assam to a national scale Digital Public Good has been about one core idea: making data useful for action, where it matters most,” said Deepak Gupta, Director of Digital Infrastructure and Government Partnerships, Arghyam.
JalSoochak is part of a broader effort to build a Digital Public Infrastructure for India’s water sector — a set of open, interoperable systems through which data can move across programmes and institutions, enabling governments to respond to problems where and when they actually occur, rather than when they finally show up in a report.
Crores of households now have a connection. The question that follows is simpler, and harder: is the water actually there? Getting a reliable answer to that question, consistently, across every village and every state, is what the next phase of rural water delivery will depend on.
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