Climate change: a natural streamliner towards entomophagy?
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MINI-REVIEW
Climate change: a natural streamliner towards entomophagy? Dorothy N. Nyangena 1
&
John Kinyuru 1 & Samuel Imathiu 1
Received: 28 May 2020 / Accepted: 28 September 2020 # African Association of Insect Scientists 2020
Abstract Climate change has escalated into a global problem owing to its devastating impact on agriculture and food security. More specifically, climate change has triggered extreme weather events which have affected the overall agricultural sustainability, either negatively or positively, with the former outdoing the latter. This has led to a concomitant nutritional imbalance and health challenges in the human population, particularly in developing countries. Further, a nutritional imbalance and high feed prices is being felt in the animal feed production chain, due to over reliance on conventional raw material and/or ingredients, which further negatively affects livelihood incomes. Edible insects have recently gained a lot of attention, as one of the strategies to curb food/ feed and nutrition insecurity due to its several already documented benefits. This review discusses how climate change has affected food and cash crop production, together with animal production, the resulting human nutritional imbalances and the impact climate change has on edible insects. Several factors on the benefits of promotion and adoption of edible insects as food and feed have also been discussed, with an inclination towards their role in curbing global warming, while alleviating the global challenge of food and nutrition insecurity, currently and in the future. Keywords Climate change . Edible insects . Malnutrition . Entomophagy . Agriculture
Introduction Climate is the average and range of weather conditions that occur over an extended period of time; months, years or even centuries (Abatzoglou et al. 2014). Climate change therefore, is the constant alteration in the earth’s weather conditions as a consequence of a broad range of both human and natural systems (Joel 2001; Abatzoglou et al. 2014). It is more evident in the shift in global temperatures and precipitation patterns which is mainly attributed to the impact of human activities on the atmosphere. Activities such as farming, deforestation and overgrazing have played a significant role in the introduction and persistent retention of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which leads to a constant rise in global temperatures, hence, global warming (Brezina 2009). Among these activities, deforestation has a greater impact on undermining the ability of the ecosystem to regulate the quantities of
* Dorothy N. Nyangena [email protected] 1
Department of Food Science and Technology, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, P.O. Box, 6200-00200, Nairobi, Kenya
greenhouse gases such as carbon (IV) oxide (CO2), which are trapped in the atmosphere (Moraes et al. 2013). The arrival of industrial revolution has led to an increase in human-induced climate change through global warming, hence a devastating effect on weather conditions
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