Heavy wind and rain may be triggering widespread, synchronized desert locust outbreaks in key breadbasket regions of the world, new research shows. And the range of these ravenous, crop-stripping locusts could expand up to 25% due to climate change.
Sometimes, outbreaks occur in multiple locations at once, causing crop destruction and food insecurity on regional scales. For example, in 2003, four separate outbreaks started simultaneously in Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Sudan and spread to several other countries, causing an estimated $2.5 billion in crop losses over the next two years.
They found"a strong coupling between locust occurrence and climate conditions through our analysis," Xinyue Li, a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore and lead author of the new paper, told Live Science. Specifically, the meteorological data showed that locust outbreaks often hit more than one country at a time and tended to coincide with periods of intense regional rainfall and wind.