The dual crisis: Climate change simultaneously drives pollinator decline and Pest outbreaks

Insects are fundamental to global ecosystem health, providing essential services including pollination, decomposition and biological control. The global economic value of insect pollination alone is estimated at USD 235–577 billion annually, underscoring its critical role in food security and human nutrition.

Without pollinators one‐third of flowering plants would produce no seeds. Although studies have examined climate‐driven pollinator declines or pest expansions separately, these are not independent crises—yet a synthesis integrating them as linked, mutually reinforcing outcomes remains underdeveloped.

Here I discuss that climate change simultaneously restructures insect communities unevenly—accelerating pollinator decline while expanding agricultural pests—threatening both food security and ecological networks. I argue this dual crisis arises from climate change acting as a selective ecological filter, favouring opportunistic, r‐selected pests while disadvantaging specialist, K‐selected pollinators.

Synthesized evidence indicates that for every degree of warming, documented bee species richness has declined by approximately 25% since the 1990s, while pest‐induced crop losses increase by 10%–25%. These disruptions are severe across multiple biomes but are especially concerning in tropical regions, where extreme heatwaves cause catastrophic mortality in stingless bees and monitoring remains critically sparse. I review the physiological, phenological and distributional mechanisms driving these changes, including phenological mismatches that decouple flowering from pollinator emergence.

To address these challenges, I advocate for a network‐centric approach encompassing climate‐responsive integrated pest management, landscape‐scale habitat restoration and community‐based monitoring. Systematic monitoring and further research into species‐specific and network‐level responses are essential to guide effective policy and safeguard insect biodiversity in a rapidly changing climate.