While humans suffer greatly from climate disasters, a new study suggests that the majority of the insect population will become extinct as a result of climate change. Researchers discovered that 65 percent of the world’s insect population could become extinct within the next century.
The study’s findings were published in the journal Nature Climate Change, where it was stated that climate-mediated changes in thermal stress can destabilise animal populations and increase the risk of extinction, and that the effects of climate change may be more widespread than previously predicted.
‘We needed a modeling tool to understand how insect populations will be affected by variations in temperature, and that’s what we aimed to offer with this study: a more direct and accurate way for scientists to understand this dynamic,’ Dr. Kate Duffy, a former postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center said in an interview.
The researchers used sophisticated models to investigate how cold-blooded insect populations would react to projected temperature changes over the next century. They discovered that 25 of the 38 insect species they studied face an increased risk of extinction, owing to dramatic and erratic temperature swings in their local environments.
Climate change has long been predicted to have a negative impact on biological diversity and the amount of variation found in genes, species and ecosystems on Earth. They stated that maintaining diversity is critical for human health, food security, clean air and water and the preservation of millions of agricultural jobs around the world.