In the context of a major controversy on pesticide intensive lily farming in the Netherlands, Butterfly’s project co-ordinator was interviewed by a regional newspaper “Dagblad van het Noorden. Below is an English translation of the interview, published with permission of the newspaper.
Original interview in Dagblad van het Noorden (in Dutch, behind paywall).
Download English translation of interview
We officially launched the Butterfly project in Paris on 3-4 April 2025 at Norway House on the campus of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. Together with our entire team, we began to shape our shared vision for restoring pollinators and the services they provide.
On April 3–4, 2025, we came together at Norway House in Paris to officially launch the Butterfly project. We began shaping our shared mission: building a future with pollinators. Over two inspiring days, we explored the project’s key themes: the need for integrated ecological and economic approaches, the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the value of working closely with farmers, citizens, and policymakers.
Our interconnected work packages span everything from ecological modelling to public engagement, with Living Labs at the heart of the project. These real-world testing grounds will allow us to develop and trial strategies tailored to local needs and landscapes.
To round off the meeting, on April 5, we visited the Jardin Écologique in Île-de-France, one of our French Living Labs. This inspiring urban site perfectly illustrates our vision: connecting science, nature, and people in meaningful, hands-on ways.
With the project now in full swing, we’re excited to begin this four-year journey—working together to develop innovative, practical, and inclusive solutions for pollinator resilience across Europe and beyond.
You’ve got to check out Jeff’s blog for the highlights of the meeting: Project ‘Butterfly’ takes flight in Paris! | Prof. Jeff Ollerton – ecological scientist and author
all photographs: Leonidas S. Kyrgiakos
The speakers who presented at the Butterfly kick-off meeting are featured in this video
And here is a very special guest, a mason bee, who joined us for the meeting (thank you Claus Rasmussen for the shot!):
With funding from the EU, University of Bergen researchers and their large transdisciplinary team set out to help society deal with threats related to pollinator decline.
By Kamilla Stølen, originally publihed at: https://www.uib.no/en/svt/174016/pollinators-little-creatures-run-world
Painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) larvae hatching. “The metamorphosis by which a caterpillar turns into a butterfly symbolises the project’s transformative approach that is essential to get biodiversity back on a path to recovery,” says van der Sluijs. Photo: Paul Gorbould/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
When Jeroen van der Sluijs, Professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (SVT), received the news that he and his team had received funding from the EU for their proposal BUTTERFLY, he was of course happy. However, he also exclaimed, slightly panicky: “I have never led a consortium of this size before!”
As PI of the project, Van der Sluijs certainly has his work cut out for him: He and his UiB team, colleagues Laura Drivdal (University of Bergen Library) and Scott Bremer (SVT), spearhead a multimillion project with a diverse consortium of 24 partners.
The funding from the EU enables the establishment of a broad international and transdisciplinary collaboration aiming at pollinator stewardship in all sectors of the economy.
It also allows the project to focus on the human dimensions of pollinator decline and work to boost the engagement of the social sciences and the humanities in policy-relevant research. This type of research is urgently needed for the successful implementation of Europe’s Biodiversity strategy for 2030 and beyond.
Given the challenge BUTTERFLY will grapple with, it is no wonder the consortium needs to be large and varied.
“Our society and nature depend heavily on pollinators, many of which are threatened species. We are thus vulnerable to the far-reaching cascading impacts of pollinator decline,” says van der Sluijs.
“90 major crops, which makes up 35 % of the world food production volume, depend on pollinators, and 94 % of all flowering plants on earth rely on hundreds of thousands of different pollinating insect species such as hoverflies, moths, beetles, butterflies and bees, to name a few.”
These cascading and potentially devastating impacts of pollinator decline, or the butterfly effect if you will, have given the project its name. However, the butterfly is only one of many pollinators that are vital to our society. This is one of the problems we are facing in trying to deal with the decline and its effects, says van der Sluijs:
“The character and full magnitude of threats to human well-being are poorly known, and pollinators’ benefits are inadequately understood. Other benefits than crop pollination remain for the most part obscure.”
There are major knowledge gaps regarding the full spectrum of animals that pollinate wild and cultivated plants in Europe and overseas territories beyond the better-known insects like bees, butterflies and moths. Did you know, for instance, that bats are also pollinators?
“BUTTERFLY aims to fill these gaps by increasing our knowledge about pollinators, creating public awareness and appreciation of pollinators’ complex ecological, economic and societal benefits, and helping identify and transform unsustainable practices in agriculture, industry and society,” say van der Sluijs.
The project will also develop concrete tools to help us restore our pollinators and their habitats: New models and datasets to assess and forecast both monetary and non-monetary value of pollinators, tools for mainstreaming pollinator conservation within the food, health, energy, materials and land management sectors, and stakeholder networks from local to EU levels that will collectively contribute to what the BUTTERFLY team have dubbed “pollinator stewardship.”
“‘Pollinator stewardship’ is the proactive and responsible caretaking for enhancing positive and reducing negative impacts on pollinators and pollinator dependent biodiversity in all one’s activities,” explains van der Sluijs.
A lot of this work will be done in BUTTERFLY’s network of Living Labs, which will serve as breeding places for multi-actor co-creation of knowledge and sustainable solutions, paving the way to pollinator stewardship in all sectors.
“A Living Lab is defined as an “open innovation ecosystem in real-life environments using interactive feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact,” says van der Sluijs.
BUTTERFLY’s Living Labs will assess how five key biomass supply chains (food/micronutrients, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, biomaterials, biomass energy) critically depend on pollination. Together with all actors involved in each supply chain, the Living Labs will co-create and test pollinator restoration options that increase the resilience of these supply chains.
The metamorphosis by which a caterpillar turns into a butterfly symbolises the project’s transformative approach that is essential to get biodiversity back on a path to recovery. Van der Sluijs highlights that once we better understand how the negative consequences of pollinator loss can cascade into catastrophes, this same butterfly effect can be used as a strategy for positive change:
Small, well-chosen pollinator restoration efforts can cascade into large impacts benefiting pollinator populations.
Ultimately, what BUTTERFLY hopes to achieve is to enhance society’s capacity to appraise, foresee, and respond to the threats posed by cascading impacts of pollinator decline on nature, society, economy and human wellbeing.
The Butterfly Project