We would like to clarify points raised in William Sutherland's criticism of the treatment of pollinators in the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (Nature 503,167; 2013). The estimated economic costs of pollinator decline are only as robust as the natural science on which they rest, as Sutherland indicates. If we could predict with certainty the effects of changes in pollinator populations on agricultural production, then evaluating them would be trivial. It was because of uncertainty in the underlying population ecology that we omitted estimates of pollination services from our economic analysis of the impacts of land-use change in our report, which was extensively peer-reviewed (see also I. J. Bateman et al Science 341,45-50; 2013).
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