(CU)_Over the recent years, the global community has been accelerating efforts to slash their carbon emissions and minimise global warming in order to tackle extreme weather conditions that continue to claim millions of lives and cause property damage worth billions of dollars each year. A recent study has found the impact of the warming world on insect populations, which play a crucial role in protecting the environment.
The report, which was published in Nature, an international journal of science, said the effects of global warming, together with shrinking habitats led to the reduction of population numbers of insects by nearly 50 per cent. It also triggered a decline of 27 per cent in the diversity of their species within insect assemblages, compared those in “less-disturbed habitats with lower rates of historical climate warming”.
“These patterns are particularly evident in the tropical realm, whereas some positive responses of biodiversity to climate change occur in non-tropical regions in natural habitats. A high availability of nearby natural habitat often mitigates reductions in insect abundance and richness associated with agricultural land use and substantial climate warming but only in low-intensity agricultural systems,” read an abstract of the report.
The researchers reached these conclusions following the study of 18,000 species ranging from bees to butterflies and beetles. It drew from 750,00 data points collected from 6,000 locations during a time span of 20 years starting from 1992. “Previous studies have been carried out at the small scale on a limited number of species or species groups,” Charlie Outhwaite, the study’s lead author and a macroecologist at University College London’s Centre for Biodiversity and Environmental Research, said.
Until recently, intensive agriculture and habitat loss were identified as the major drivers of insect decline. However, this study found that insects are experiencing extended periods of high temperatures which threaten their very existence. The consequences of this massive decline in insect populations are significant. According to experts, about 75 per cent of global food crops, including coffee, cocoa, almonds and cherries, depend on animal pollination. On the other hand, some insects like ladybugs, ground beetles, spiders and wasps are crucial for pest control.
“We know that you can’t just keep losing species without, ultimately, causing a catastrophic outcome,” Tom Oliver, a professor of applied ecology at the University of Reading, said. “You cannot keep removing rivets from an aeroplane without it eventually falling out of the sky.”
