Climate warming promotes pesticide resistance through expanding overwintering range of a global pest

Chun-Sen Ma,He-Ping Yang,Xiang-Qian Chang,Liang Zhu,Gang Ma,Volker H W Rudolf,Fei Zhao,Wei Zhang,Yu Peng,Kun Xing

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25505-7

Abstract

Climate change has the potential to change the distribution of pests globally and their resistance to pesticides, thereby threatening global food security in the 21st century. However, predicting where these changes occur and how they will influence current pest control efforts is a challenge. Using experimentally parameterised and field-tested models, we show that climate change over the past 50 years increased the overwintering range of a global agricultural insect pest, the diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella), by ~2.4 million km2 worldwide. Our analysis of global data sets revealed that pesticide resistance levels are linked to the species’ overwintering range: mean pesticide resistance was 158 times higher in overwintering sites compared to sites with only seasonal occurrence. By facilitating local persistence all year round, climate change can promote and expand pesticide resistance of this destructive species globally. These ecological and evolutionary changes would severely impede effectiveness of current pest control efforts and potentially cause large economic losses.

Highlights

Climate change has the potential to change the distribution of pests globally and their resistance to pesticides, thereby threatening global food security in the 21st century
To understand the connection between range shifts and pesticide resistance first requires a detailed understanding of how climate change will alter the geographic range of pest species
The model was developed using a set of survival experiments under controlled environmental conditions in the laboratory that exposed 13,200 individuals to 10 temperature regimes representing different geographic sites spread across the range of the diamondback moth in China (Fig. 1, Supplementary Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Climate change has the potential to change the distribution of pests globally and their resistance to pesticides, thereby threatening global food security in the 21st century. By facilitating local persistence all year round, climate change can promote and expand pesticide resistance of this destructive species globally. These ecological and evolutionary changes would severely impede effectiveness of current pest control efforts and potentially cause large economic losses. Pesticide usage and pesticide resistance have increased in these regions[5,6] While these patterns appear linked, climate-mediated range shift and pesticide resistance are traditionally examined independently of each other. It is still unknown how changes in pest distribution will affect the development and distribution of pesticide resistance under future climate change scenarios. In locations with permanent populations, pests are often repeatedly exposed to the same pesticide, allowing resistant individuals to increase each year[12]

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