Parts of the world are heading toward an insect apocalypse, study suggests
Scientists have found a clear link between extreme land use and the climate crisis in pushing insect species toward collapse.
(CNN)Extreme land use combined with warming temperatures are pushing insect ecosystems toward collapse in some parts of the world.
The study, published in the journal Nature, identified for the first time a clear and alarming link between the climate crisis and high-intensity agriculture and showed that, in places where those impacts are particularly high, insect abundance has already dropped by nearly 50%, while the number of species has been slashed by 27%.
These findings raise huge concerns, according to Charlotte Outhwaite, the lead author on the study and researcher at the University College London, given the important role of insects in local ecosystems, pollination and food production, and noted that losing insects could threaten human health and food security.
“Three quarters of our crops depend on insect pollinators,” Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex in the UK, previously told CNN. “Crops will begin to fail. We won’t have things like strawberries.
“We can’t feed 7.5 billion people without insects.”
Outhwaite said their findings “may only represent the tip of the iceberg,” because of the limited amount of evidence in some regions.
“But I think there are also a lot of consequences that we probably don’t really know because obviously there are so many different kinds of insects,” Outhwaite told CNN. “They do so many important things. We just don’t have a strong handle on how much we rely on them for certain situations.”
Tom Oliver, a professor of applied ecology at the University of Reading, said in a statement that scientists don’t yet know when insect populations could reach a point of no return, where their losses would be too great to overcome.
“In terms of a potential tipping point where the loss of insects causes whole ecosystems to collapse, the honest answer is we just don’t know when the point of no return is,” said Oliver, who was not involved in the study. “We know that you can’t just keep losing species without, ultimately, causing a catastrophic outcome.”
He likened the gradual loss to removing rivets from an airplane, which you can’t keep doing “without it eventually falling out of the sky.”
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Insects have declined by 50% in parts of world because of human activity, study shows – CNN
