What do we know about insect responses to global change?
First published: 02 June 2025
A new review article has implications for policies focusing on protecting habitats with native and diverse plant communities, as well as regulating the use of pesticides, in order to help mitigate the negative impacts of global change on insects.
The review, What do we know about insect responses to global change? A review of meta-analyses on global change drivers, published in RES journal Insect Conservation and Diversity, focuses on how global change is causing major declines in biodiversity, especially of insects. Scientific interest in global change impacts on insects has increased in recent years, resulting in many different meta-analyses examining questions within this topic.
Some of the research group at the start of the collaboration during a symposium at the International Congress of Entomology in Helsinki. The authors of the review performed a comprehensive review of meta-analyses examining the effects of global change stressors on insects. This was used to identify well-studied questions and gaps in scientific knowledge and synthesise the responses of insects to those stressors. They identified 75 meta-analyses fitting their scope, accounting for 905 meta-results and spanning 18 global change stressors.
Their synthesis has identified several global change stressors that are relatively well-studied across insect groups, such as agriculture, habitat degradation, and pesticide use. Moreover, other global change stressors were found to be relatively less studied, highlighting areas that need more attention; for example, very few meta-analyses considered the impacts of global warming, ozone, light pollution, and interactive effects of multiple stressors on insects.
Most stressors are more associated with negative than positive effects on insects, except for nutrient addition, ozone, and air pollution. Their results emphasised that negative effects accounted for the large majority of consequences on reproductive responses, which may help explain recent insect declines. Additionally, they found evidence for higher trophic levels being more negatively affected by global change and that insects in aquatic habitats experienced fewer negative responses to stressors. Importantly, the researchers identified that very few meta-analyses consider multiple stressors acting together. Future meta-analyses and primary studies exploring the effects of these global change stressors and multiple stressors acting together will improve our understanding of the many ways insects are affected by global change.
Given these largely negative impacts of global change on insects, the authors argue for the need for national and local policy actions to monitor and actively conserve insect communities.
“Insect populations are declining globally. Meta-analyses can be a valuable tool for synthesizing research, enabling us to understand how different global change stressors affect insects. To move our meta-analytical efforts forward, we need to know what has already been done and which areas need to be prioritized. Our review can be a guide to focus our meta-analytical efforts. When we gain a more comprehensive understanding of how these various stressors affect insects, we will be able to target our conservation and mitigation intentions more effectively.”
– First author, Mayra Cadorin Vidal
Follow us on social media for updates and share your insect news and events using @royentsoc
Want to be featured in our Journal Highlights?
Shine a spotlight on your research by submitting your papers to any of our seven journals for the chance to be mentioned on our news pages and social media
