When Climate Fuels Pests: How Climate Change-Induced Pest Invasion is Reshaping Ecosystems and Livelihoods in East Africa

Climate Change and Agroecosystem Pest Dynamics: A Critical Narrative Review of Impacts on Insect Pests, Their Natural Enemies, and Implications for Crop Protection

Climate change is altering the physiology, phenology, distribution and interaction networks of agricultural insect pests and the natural enemies that regulate them, yet the literature addressing these changes remains fragmented across disciplines and taxa. This critical narrative review synthesises evidence on how rising temperatures, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, altered precipitation and increasing climatic variability affect insect pests and their predators, parasitoids and entomopathogens in agricultural systems, and evaluates the resulting implications for crop protection. Warming generally accelerates insect development, increases voltinism and extends the geographical range of many pest species, while its effects on natural enemies are more variable and frequently negative, owing to a combination of lower thermal optima among parasitoids relative to their hosts, disrupted phenological synchrony, and altered chemosensory cues that impair host or prey location. Elevated carbon dioxide most often reduces host-plant nitrogen content, prompting compensatory feeding by herbivores, with inconsistent consequences for third-trophic-level performance. Case evidence from the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, bark beetle outbreaks in coniferous forests, desert locust plagues linked to Indian Ocean climate variability, and cereal aphid–parasitoid systems illustrates convergent patterns of pest release alongside marked context-dependency. Meta-analytic evidence indicates that predators continue to suppress pests and support yield across a range of climates, and that landscape complexity can buffer biological control against climatic variability, offering a partial counterweight to the more pessimistic single-species findings. Methodological heterogeneity, including short experimental durations, single-factor manipulations, and geographic concentration of research in temperate systems, limits confidence in generalising current findings to tropical and subtropical smallholder systems where food security risks are often greatest. Research priorities include multifactorial and multigenerational experiments, standardised reporting of thermal and moisture regimes, and expanded evidence from under-represented regions and cropping systems. The review concludes that climate change is reshaping the balance of tritrophic interactions in ways that generally favour pests over their natural enemies, but that this outcome is neither universal nor immutable, and that landscape-scale conservation of natural enemy diversity is among the more defensible adaptive strategies currently supported by evidence.

Climate-Driven Range Shifts in Insect Pests: Redrawing the Global Map of Crop Vulnerability

Rising global temperatures, shifting precipitation regimes, and elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide are altering the geographic ranges, phenology, and population dynamics of insect pests that damage the world's major food crops. This review synthesises evidence on the physiological mechanisms, observed range shifts, and projected redistribution of agriculturally important insect species under contemporary and future climate scenarios. Poleward and altitudinal expansions have already been documented across multiple pest taxa, with average latitudinal displacement rates in the low single-digit kilometres per year, and modelling studies project further acceleration under mid- and high-emission trajectories. Case evidence from fall armyworm, cotton leafworm, maize stemborers, and several rice pests illustrates how thermal tolerance, developmental plasticity, and host-plant availability jointly determine the pace and direction of range change. Elevated carbon dioxide modifies host-plant nutritional and defensive chemistry in ways that can either suppress or, in some circumstances, enhance herbivore performance, complicating simple temperature-based forecasts. Economic assessments indicate that warming-driven increases in insect-mediated crop losses could reach double-digit percentage increases per degree Celsius for staple cereals, disproportionately affecting temperate breadbasket regions, while invasive insects already impose costs exceeding tens of billions of US dollars annually worldwide. Species distribution modelling, mechanistic niche models, and hybrid approaches are increasingly used to anticipate these shifts, though model uncertainty, incomplete occurrence data, and neglect of biotic interactions remain persistent limitations. The review closes by identifying priority research directions, drawing overall conclusions for policy and practice, and acknowledging the methodological limitations inherent to a narrative synthesis of a rapidly evolving evidence base.

Advances and challenges in using smart agroforestry and climate- modified outdoor planting techniques in the last decade: a systematic literature review

Climate Change and African Agricultural Resilience: A 10‐Year Comprehensive Review of Adaptive Capacity, Policy, and Environmental Stewardship

In the current era, climate change has emerged as a fundamental threat to African agriculture, driven by increasingly erratic climatic patterns such as prolonged rainfall, decadal droughts, and escalating thermal stress. This review evaluates contemporary agricultural productivity by gathering and analyzing empirical data from academic publications and credible online resources indexed between 2015 and 2025. The primary objective is to delineate the impacts of climatic instability on yield trajectories and food system accessibility. Utilizing a regional comparative framework, the study examines 10 African nations (two per geographic region) to identify localized and pan‐African trends. Data synthesis from Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar reveals that climatic variations have fundamentally undermined food security, contributing to famine, economic displacement, and the erosion of rural livelihoods. Key barriers to effective adaptation were identified as financial incapacity, weak institutional synergy, and a deficit in research and development infrastructure. Consequently, this review highlights the urgent need for a multifaceted resilience strategy that harmonizes indigenous adaptation practices, advanced genomics technology, application of artificial intelligence, and digital climate‐smart technologies. Strengthening food security will require not only technological adoption but also robust policy frameworks, incentivized investment, infrastructural development, and the expansion of extension services to bridge the gap between climate research and on‐farm implementation.

Climate-Resilient Agriculture in Central Europe: Crop Diversification, Food Safety, and Integrated Adaptation Pathways

Climate change is increasingly reshaping agricultural systems across Central Europe through rising temperatures, altered precipitation regimes, droughts, heatwaves, and expanding biological risks. These pressures threaten the stability of conventional cropping systems while simultaneously affecting food safety, storage systems, processing infrastructure, and regional food security. This review explores the role of adaptive crop diversification as a key strategy for enhancing agricultural resilience in the face of future climate uncertainty. Drawing on IPCC AR6 scenarios, CMIP6 simulations, and EURO-CORDEX projections, we analyze major climatic stressors affecting Central European agriculture, including heat stress, hydrological instability, soil degradation, invasive pests, fungal pathogens, and mycotoxin contamination. Particular attention is given to shifts in crop suitability and the growing relevance of climate-resilient crops such as sorghum, millet, quinoa, chickpea, lentil, soybean, camelina, hemp, and miscanthus. Beyond field-level adaptation, the review highlights the critical role of post-harvest systems, storage infrastructure, processing adaptability, and food safety within climate-resilient food systems. We additionally evaluate socioeconomic barriers, policy frameworks, and emerging technological approaches, including digital agriculture and artificial intelligence. A central contribution of this review is the integration of crop diversification, food safety, post-harvest adaptation, and governance challenges within a unified climate-resilience framework for Central European agriculture. We conclude that long-term agricultural resilience in the region will require a systemic transformation that integrates ecological, technological, economic, institutional, and social dimensions of adaptation.

Climate-driven redistribution of agro-ecological zones in Ghana and its implications for agroecosystem sustainability.

Understanding how sustained warming reshapes ecological boundaries remains a critical challenge in climate-ecosystem research, particularly across climate-sensitive regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Although temperature increases and land-cover change have been widely documented, the causal mechanisms linking climate variability to the redistribution of agro-ecological zones (AEZs) remain limited. Here we integrate multi-decadal land surface temperature (LST) and precipitation (PRE) datasets (1975-2025) with correlation analysis and nonlinear causal inference methods, including Extended Convergent Cross Mapping (ECCM) and its geographical extension (EGCCM), to examine climate-driven ecological restructuring in Ghana. Results reveal a significant warming trend of +2.39°C (≈0.47°C decade-1; p < 0.05), while precipitation shows strong inter-decadal variability without a significant long-term trend. During the same period, savanna systems expanded from 74,945 km2 to 128,355 km2, whereas forest ecosystems declined from 91,895 km2 to 60,070 km2. ECCM and EGCCM analyses identify temperature as the dominant driver of AEZ redistribution, demonstrating that sustained warming is reorganizing ecological boundaries and accelerating savanna-forest transitions across West Africa. These findings provide a causal and spatially explicit basis for prioritizing climate adaptation and land management strategies in regions most vulnerable to warming-driven ecological change.