Beyond bees and butterflies: Why S-E Asia must boost insect conservation

Shift focus beyond just charismatic animals to safeguard region's biodiversity

- Ong Xin Rui and Eleanor Slade

When people think of conservation, they often focus on large mammals or birds, but insects are just as vital to healthy ecosystems.

Insects perform crucial ecosystem functions, such as pollination, biocontrol and decomposition. Around 75 per cent of our crops are insect pollinated, and research has shown that a loss in pollinators has led to a reduction in fruit, vegetable and nut production.

Yet, our research has found that across South-east Asia, insect conservation remains severely under-represented in research, funding and public discourse.

In recent years, claims of a global "insect apocalypse" have led to much interest among the public and scientific community towards insect conservation.

However, this seemingly devastating claim could be overstated, as it was made based on just a few highly localised studies.

Yet, the debates surrounding this narrative highlight the importance of understanding local and regional patterns of insect populations before reporting any global trends.

Within South-east Asia, however, insect conservation and monitoring efforts are still lacking.

Many species face threats from habitat loss, climate change and human activities, but they remain understudied and underfunded.

Without proper research and conservation efforts, we risk losing insect species before we even manage to describe them and understand their ecological roles.

In January, we published a study in Ecology Letters that analysed over 500,000 South-east Asian insect records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility – an open-access repository of global biodiversity data – and over 7,500 South-east Asian insect studies in scientific papers.

Our findings revealed significant data gaps – most insect records in the region were of the charismatic butterflies, while many other insect groups remain largely overlooked.