An Overview on Locust Swarms and Their Impact

Locust Swarms

Since late 2019, East Africa and the Middle East have been undergoing their worst locust outbreaks in decades. A little locust swarm can eat more food than 35,000 people, but some locust swarms in the area have increased to over two thousand times that size. And it’s all coming right on the heels of a season of flooding in the region.

But that isn’t a fluke: The desert locust grows when dry weather turns wet. And in 2018 and 2019, a series of freak weather events brought record-setting rain to the Middle East and East Africa. The end result of all this is an area at risk of a famine, in the middle of a global pandemic. And because this new type of weather is a hallmark of climate change, it’s also the kind of thing we can anticipate to happen again and again.

Video by Vox

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