The role of pollination in the LCA studies of honey

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used for the improvement of the environmental performance of products and services, amongst which the food systems. For this reason, a great number of food LCA case studies and reviews of case studies has been published in the scientific literature. Nevertheless, amongst the food products, honey appears to have been rarely analysed. Indeed, a preliminary literature review, carried out by the Authors, resulted in only two peer-reviewed scientific papers (one of which, was on carbon footprint). Honey is one of the natural products, which is considered to have a great range of benefits for the human health. Besides that, the role of honey bees as pollinators can be regarded as one of the functions of an apiculture system and is undoubtedly of utmost importance both for natural ecosystems and agriculture. The main objective of this paper is to explore this role, by means of a literature review, as one of the apiculture system functions. Furthermore, the management of this multifunctional system in honey-related LCA case-studies, is addressed. The literature review was performed using the EBSCOhost Discovery service, using a combination of keywords, such as “honey” AND “pollinat*”, “pollinat*” AND “economic value”, “LCA” AND “pollinat*”, etc. This resulted in 9 articles. The examined papers showed that pollination regards an issue that has not been tackled with so far in LCA case studies. Indeed, none of these papers tackled this issue. On the other hand, the issue of the economic evaluation of the pollination service was found to have been fairly examined. Indeed, several papers (9 articles) discussed its economic value. This paper proposes the inclusion of the pollination service as one of the functions of a multifunctional system in LCAs (other functions including, e.g., the provision of honey, beeswax, etc.) and provides some insight for the management of the multi- functionality of this kind of system in LCA studies. The discussed economic allocation, indeed, can be important as the provided economic value of the pollination can be comparable to -and in some cases even higher than (estimated to be even 8 to 10 times higher)- the one of the main product (honey) itself.