Transforming society through pollinator stewardship. Butterfly is a Horizon Europe RIA project with 24 partners. It aims to enhance society’s capacity to appraise, foresee, and respond to the threats posed by cascading impacts of pollinator decline.
Amid steep pollinator declines, the character and full magnitude of threats of pollinator loss to human well-being are poorly known and society’s dependency on healthy plant-pollinator networks are inadequately understood. The cascading impacts (“butterfly effects“) of pollinator loss can be far reaching. Major supply chains for food and nutrients, bio-materials, bio-energy crops, medicine, and cosmetics all critically depend on pollinators.
Butterfly will address these important knowledge gaps and will co-create and test tools for foresight and practices for proactive restoration of pollinator habitats in a network of living-labs across Europe and 3 overseas sites. The project started on 1 March 2025 and will run for 48 months.
Our goal is to make a real difference to the way our society operates. We want to stop and reverse the decline of pollinators. We want to see a major shift in our approach to nature, the way we farm, community practices, policies, economies, households and attitudes.
Butterfly’s impact should be significant positive changes in biodiversity, pollinator-dependent farming practices and related businesses, community practices, policies, economy, private households and mindsets, across and beyond Europe.
Butterfly – what’s in a name?
There is a high diversity of pollinators in Europe: more than 2,100 bee species, 900 different types of hoverflies, 500 butterflies, thousands of moths and potentially tens of thousands of flower-visiting flies, wasps, beetles, other insects, and pollinating birds, as well as bats and lizards in some of the Overseas Territories. Among these, we selected the butterfly as name-giver for our project because it is a metaphorical pollinator. It is a delicate and vulnerable creature, and a universal symbol of beauty.
The metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly symbolises the project’s transformative approach, which is essential to restoring biodiversity.
Historical origin of Butterfly Effect: Benjamin Franklin’s poetic early warning of the cascading effects by which entire Kingdoms depend on small things, is now known as the Butterfly Effect. The same is true of small restoration efforts: a single, well-chosen action can have a huge positive impact on pollinator populations.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
For want of a rider the battle was lost,
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail
13th-century poem by didactic poet Freidank /
popularized in 1732 by Benjamin Franklin
A video introduction to Butterfly