The world's insect population is in decline — and that's bad news for humans
Habitat loss, pesticides and climate change are threatening insect populations worldwide. In 2019, Biological Conservation reported that 40% of all insects species are declining globally and that a third of them are endangered.
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On what the loss of pollinators means
You've got some places in China where the loss of insects is so great that armies of people have been told to ... fan out and go through orchards with ... paint brushes and feathers on sticks to pollinate crops by hand — a hugely ... labor intensive operation that obviously isn't really sustainable long-term. We need the insects around to do these jobs as they've done them for millions of years.
So there is this growing ... rumble of concern about food insecurity, especially when you think about what's happening with the overall trends. I mean, the world's population is growing.
There's been a ... 300% increase in the volume of agricultural production dependent on animal pollination in the last 50 years. So we're losing pollinators at a time when we're demanding more and more pollination. We have more mouths to feed. We need more farmland. We need more intensively farmed farmland. At this kind of crucial moment, we're losing the pollinators that do that for us.
On the variety of insects that serve as pollinators
Bees get a lot of the focus and the attention when it comes to pollination, but there's a whole array of insects that provide that pollination service. In fact, three-quarters of the world's flowering plants and about a third of the world's food crops depend on pollinators at some stage. And so it's not just bees .... Flies are huge pollinators. That includes the midges that pollinate the cocoa crop that chocolate comes from. And there are wasps as well. Wasps are major pollinators. Again, another insect that's widely disliked but actually crucial for our environment.
Without these creatures, we would be without apples, cranberries, melons, almonds, broccoli, blueberries, cherries, I mean, the list goes on and on. We'd even be without ice cream, because alfalfa ... that is fed to cows ... is [pollinated by insects]. So we'd be without many of the kind of staples of our lives, many of the luxuries of our lives. Curries would become a historical dish, because cardamom would not be there, cumin would not be there. Many spices — many of the things that make our diets kind of colorful, interesting and nutritious — would be stripped from our lives without insects.
That's a really important thing to think about when we're thinking about pollinator declines because many of the world's poor rely upon agriculture that's directly pollinated in their immediate surroundings, and without that, all of the nutrition is stripped from their diets. Malnutrition rates start to climb. ...The U.N. has warned that this is going to become a food security issue, something that the world needs to focus on quite acutely.
On the importance of the insects at the base of the food chain
Once you kind of yank insects out of the base of the food chain, everything kind of starts toppling away from above them, really. They're crucial in terms of just the basic foundations of forests and grassland ecosystems. We think about the placement of soil as a cycling of nitrogen through the soils that ensures that plants grow.
We may hate mosquitoes, but they provide a huge amount of food to frogs and then also birds. Once you start climbing up the food chain, you start affecting things that we really do value. So, as well as these declines that have been documented in insects, bird numbers have been reported to be down in several countries, and the birds that eat insects are faring far worse than the birds that are omnivorous, such as crows, for example. They provide a really important base to the food pyramid, and they provide a really crucial part of our overall environment.
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On insect habitat loss
When we think about habitat loss, we think about the idea of the Amazon rainforest being burned down or chopped down. But a lot of the habitat loss is far more mundane. It's the conversion of a barren piece of land or seemingly barren piece of land into a Starbucks. It's the conversion of a field where wildflowers will grow into a field of soy or corn or another single crop. It's largely driven by agriculture. Some of it is also driven by urban sprawl. These are the laying down of highways, heavy industry and so on. So it's obviously a model that's exploded in Europe and North America, and that model is being transported elsewhere. You're seeing other countries adopt this method of farming large fields of single crops, dousing them with insecticides and other chemicals in order to boost their yields. So a lot of what we consider unproductive grounds, messy land, the kind of stuff the place is filled with wildflowers, with scrub, with kind of brambles and weeds, we call them weeds when they're in fact actually really important food providers for insects.
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