Against all expectations the Desert Locust upsurge that began in 2019 is still ongoing also at the beginning of 2022. The upsurge continues to profoundly threaten vast regions, especially the Horn of Africa and Western Asia, with already vulnerable regional rural livelihoods and food security put at further peril.

Given that due to climate change, conditions favouring desert locust outbreaks will likely occur more frequently and in intensity, this Scoping Paper calls for renewed global governance.

In an interconnected world facing unprecedented events and disasters, it is pivotal to instill and coordinate innovative early warning and outbreak prevention systems both at the global and regional level to increase resilience in times of the climate crisis.

Key messages:

1. There is increasing evidence that meteorological shifts (higher temperatures in the Indian Ocean) due to climate change have played an important role in the scale and severity of the 2019 desert locust upsurge.

2. With climate change likely to lay the foundations for more frequent and possibly more intensive outbreaks, the status quo of the distribution of responsibilities of countries and regional and global level needs to be reviewed and adjusted. This equates to better and more rapid coordination, within the realm of superior governance, which is urgently needed in the name of early warning and control, and resilience. Several independent evaluations of the unfolding of the crisis and management methods to date, all underscore this key message.

3. The importance of climate for new patterns and regional distributions of outbreaks of pests and diseases has to be recognised. Prevention and management of transboundary pests and diseases need to be integrated into climate change adaptation and resilience efforts.

4. As in past locust upsurges, the current transboundary outbreak has resulted in millions of litres of highly toxic pesticides being unleashed into the environment, mainly as a measure of “last resort” by countries to mitigate transboundary swarms. It is an imperative to understand the “true cost” of the current desert locust campaign, not just the fiscal costs, but also the expected prohibitive costs to the environment and to human health caused by such toxic pesticides. In other words, making the invisible costs visible. Once monetised, a compelling case can be made to the multilateral system for creating better global governance and investing in the underpinning early warning and control systems, so that harmful pesticides could eventually be relegated to redundancy.

5. In this respect, and under the domain of effective global governance, it is paramount to put due emphasis on the much-needed political processes in defining roles, responsibilities, and the requisite actions to be undertaken jointly with all stakeholders. In doing so, the potential to optimise on crises prevention collaboratively, also through investing in management systems will be realised, so that the world is better prepared for future outbreaks of locusts and other transboundary pests.

6. TMG’s work on locusts should serve as an exemplar to reshape our thinking about transboundary threats considering climate change and how the interplay of science, infrastructure, management strategies and a global governance model can lead to a more resilient future.