Erratic weather fueled by climate change will worsen locust outbreaks
Larger, more severe desert locust outbreaks are likely in the future because of climate change-driven extreme wind and rain, according to a Science Advances article published yesterday; a swarm of 80 million locusts covering a square kilometer can consume in a single day food crops that could feed 35,000 people.
Desert locusts threaten crop production and food security. Spatially synchronized locust outbreaks further exacerbate these crises. Continental-scale understanding of such compound locust risks and underlying climatic drivers is crucial to designing coordinated and predictive control strategies but remains elusive. Here, we develop a data-driven framework to assess the compound risk of locust outbreaks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and elucidate the role of climate in locust dynamics. We find that more than one-fifth of high-risk country pairs faced spatially synchronized locust risks from 1985 to 2020, dominated by concurrent winds or inundations. Individual locusts are more prone to infest arid areas punched by extreme rainfall. The spatial prevalence of locusts is strongly modulated by climate variability such as El Niño–Southern Oscillation. A warming climate will lead to widespread increases in locust outbreaks with emerging hotspots in west central Asia, posing additional challenges to the global coordination of locust control.