(Photo by Peter Miller via Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
When the first accessible, properly-functioning car washes appeared in Europe in the 1960s, people queued up in fascination.
It wasn’t just the novelty that drew them, but relief from a tedious chore: in summer, bumpers and windshields were often caked with insects, such as mosquitoes, flies, beetles, and moths. The brush arms of those early car washes weren’t a luxury but a necessity, although they often struggled with the sheer layer of insects.
When thinking about today’s Europe, the necessity of visiting a car wash to get rid of caked-on layers of insects is unimaginable. Researchers and journalists claim that Europe is experiencing an insect apocalypse, with huge negative impacts on biodiversity and food security.
In 2017, German and Dutch researchers showed a shocking decline of 75% of the total insect population over fewer than 30 years (~3-4% per year), even in protected areas. Yet, European countries are not the only ones facing this decline; a global study in 2020 revealed that insect populations worldwide are disappearing by around 1% each year. Understanding the crucial roles insects play in our ecosystems helps explain why their rapid decline is so alarming.
The Hidden Power of Insects
Our world is populated with 10 quintillion insects, which translates into roughly 1.2 billion insects for every human being on earth. Insects are related to virtually all other life. They pollinate most of our plants, which are mostly angiosperms (flowering plants) that require pollinators to move their pollen from one flower to another. By doing so, the plants’ genetic diversity is increased, which results in plants being more resistant to disease and climate change.
On top of that, about 75% of major food crops benefit from insect pollination, and roughly 35% of global food production directly depends on it. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, coffee, and cacao are especially reliant. Besides their role as pollinators, insects are vital contributors to the decomposition process. Most insects spend their winter underground, where their digging and feeding activities improve soil structure and aeration.
While the actual breakdown of organic matter is carried out by fungi and bacteria, insects play an essential supporting role. By fragmenting leaves and other debris, they make it easier for these microorganisms to do their work. In doing so, insects help release nutrients and oxygen into the soil, maintaining its fertility and overall ecosystem health. Without them, nutrient recycling would slow down, and soils would gradually lose their vitality. In short, without insects, many plants would become extinct, birds, fish, and mammals would lose their main food source, and nutrient cycling would collapse.
The Disappearing Wilderness
The real culprit behind the insect decline is the loss of untouched nature, a gradual process that has been happening for thousands of years. Ever since humans started agricultural practices around 10,000 BC, humans have transformed forests and wilderness through clearing them away to make space for fields and villages. This accelerated rapidly during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 20th century, intensive agriculture, urbanization, and infrastructure development drove the proportion of true wilderness to decline dramatically. Today, only about 23% of the world’s land remains as landscapes largely free of human pressures, while in Europe this figure is estimated at less than 1%.
If we look at our modern agriculture practices, around 75% of all cropland worldwide falls under the category of monoculture, the practice of growing a single crop species. Monoculture became so influential because it’s simply an effective way to maximize efficiency and profits. It enables easy mechanization and standardization, delivers the uniform yields that markets prefer, and was further encouraged by post-WWII policies and subsidies promoting large-scale single-crop farming.
However, this efficiency comes at a high ecological cost. Monocultures destroy habitats and pollinator populations, deplete soils, and erode biodiversity, making farming systems weaker and more dependent on pesticides over time. The genetic uniformity of these crops increases their vulnerability to pests, diseases, and climate extremes, which in turn fuels an even greater reliance on pesticides.
Protecting with Pollution: The Chemical Trap in a Changing Climate
To safeguard these vulnerable systems, the widespread use of pesticides has become the norm in our current food production. While these chemicals are designed to control pests and diseases, they also inflict broad ecological damage. The chemicals kill not only harmful insects but also beneficial pollinators like bees and butterflies, disrupting food chains by affecting non-target species, and accumulating in soil and water.
This contamination harms fish, birds, and other wildlife, and ultimately affects human health through exposure and contaminated food. Over time, such practices create a vicious cycle. Ecosystems lose biodiversity, soils lose vitality, and agriculture becomes increasingly dependent on the chemicals that accelerate its decline.
Another accelerating factor is climate change. Rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and more extreme weather events put additional stress on both natural ecosystems and agricultural systems. Species that cannot adapt or migrate quickly enough face extinction, while pests and diseases often spread more easily in warmer conditions, intensifying the use of chemical control. At the same time, climate change erodes the capacity of natural landscapes to act as carbon sinks, creating a feedback loop that drives further loss of biodiversity and ecosystem stability.
The Role of Meat Consumption and Nitrogen Pollution
Another big reason for the loss of biodiversity in Europe is the large amount of meat people eat and the pollution caused by livestock farming—raising animals for food, milk, and other products. Producing meat, especially beef and pork, requires large amounts of crops like maize and soy for animal feed, leading to large areas planted with only one type of crop.
Farm animals also release high levels of ammonia gas, which mixes in the air and falls back to the ground as nitrogen. Too much nitrogen disrupts the natural balance of nutrients in soil and water, allowing a few fast-growing plants to take over while other, more delicate species disappear. This harms wildflowers, grasslands, and the insects and birds that rely on them for food and shelter. In places with large livestock populations, such as the Netherlands and parts of Germany, nitrogen pollution has become one of the biggest threats to insects and remaining natural habitats.
The contrasts in meat consumption reveal how culture, climate, and income profoundly shape dietary patterns and, in turn, their environmental consequences. Societies with higher meat consumption tend to have stronger livestock sectors and cultural traditions centred on animal-based foods, but this comes with higher greenhouse gas emissions, greater land and water use, and pressure on ecosystems. In contrast, regions with more plant-based or diversified diets often maintain a smaller ecological footprint and stronger links to traditional, locally adapted food systems.
Encouraging a gradual shift toward more plant-forward and regionally sustainable diets could play a vital role in lowering agricultural emissions, conserving biodiversity, and building climate resilience. Policies that promote local produce, reduce food waste, and support farmers in transitioning toward mixed or regenerative systems can help achieve this balance—ensuring that food cultures remain rich and diverse while also aligning with planetary health.
Why Europe is Worse Off
Farming reached Europe thousands of years ago with the domestication of cattle, sheep, pigs, and later horses, which thrived in the continent’s mild climate and fertile landscapes. The availability of animals and crops that could be domesticated with relative ease was one of the reasons Europe developed more rapidly than many other regions. Over millennia, this head start in agriculture meant that nearly every corner of the continent was gradually cultivated, grazed, or settled, leaving little truly wild land behind.
Today, Europe is particularly vulnerable because of its very high population density, centuries of intensive land use, and industrial development. Almost every square kilometre has been shaped by human activity, leaving only fragmented patches of wilderness scattered across the continent. When combined with monocultures, pesticide use, urbanization, and climate change, these fragments are too small and isolated to sustain healthy ecosystems in the long term.
The consequences are already visible: insect populations in Europe are disappearing four times faster than the global average. What remains is a landscape of fragmented and weakened ecosystems struggling to maintain balance under mounting human pressures. On top of these stresses, invasive insects are adding a new threat. Europe currently hosts around 1,400 invasive species, and thanks to globalized trade and transport, many more hitch-hikers arrive each year along with cargo ships and planes.
Because of the milder winters and hotter summers, Europe’s climate has become more and more suitable for these invasive insects to survive and spread. Yet this influx of new species poses serious ecological challenges. The Asian hornet, for example, has spread rapidly across much of Europe, preying heavily on honeybees by killing up to 50 bees a day and further undermining already fragile pollinator populations. Faced with this accelerating decline, Europe has begun to recognize the urgency of acting.
Translating Ambitions into Practice
How do all of these challenges and policy plans reflect the reality of ecosystems and species now under pressure? For answers, Spheres of Influence talked to Hans de Kroon, plant ecologist at Radboud University in Nijmegen and biodiversity expert, who has devoted his career to unravelling these questions. De Kroon studies how plant, bird, and insect species are changing—and what we can do to reverse this downward spiral.
De Kroon finds the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy an “ambitious and comprehensive plan that focuses on all the stages in the food chain.” The strategy, part of the EU’s broader Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, aims to reduce pesticide use by 50% and promote more sustainable farming practices. Yet, he notes that policies alone are not enough: “It’s not just the responsibility of farmers or local initiatives to tackle this change in biodiversity, it’s the responsibility of us all.”
Important progress has been made though. For example, the EU has banned several pesticides known to severely harm bees and wild pollinators, and continues to evaluate active substances for environmental and health risks. Driven by European regulations and national efforts toward more sustainable agriculture, the Netherlands has reduced pesticide use by 20% since 2020. However, critics argue that significant loopholes still remain.
Habitat restoration programs, while promising, remain underfunded and fragmented across regions. Intensive monoculture farming, heavily supported by subsidies, continues to dominate European landscapes, leaving too little room for hedgerows, wildflower strips, or crop diversity that would support insect populations. Less harmful but still damaging pesticides, such as acetamiprid or glyphosate, are still in widespread use, and many member states make frequent use of emergency derogations to temporarily re-authorize banned chemicals. This undermines the EU’s own objectives and continues to expose insects, soil life, and aquatic ecosystems to significant pressure.
This problem is not unique to Europe—other regions already show what happens when pollinators disappear. In the Chinese Sichuan region plenty of farmers have been pollinating by themselves since the 1980s, due to a big loss of pollinators. Although research has shown that manual pollination could fix the problem in the short-term, it’s way too labor-intensive, costly, inefficient, and unsustainable compared to natural pollination by insects.
From Our Plates to Our Gardens: Making a Difference
Consumers strongly influence the food chain, particularly with meat consumption, which has a big and negative impact. Dutch researchers show that adults, on average, consume 4.4 dinners a week that consist of meat. According to De Kroon, even reducing this by 30% to 3 dinners per week, “would have a huge positive impact on biodiversity and would reduce the nitrogen in the air to a more acceptable level.” Such a shift would not only benefit the environment but also demonstrate how small individual choices can collectively drive large-scale ecological change.
But eating less meat is not the only thing we should do. De Kroon suggests that “‘buying more organic, local and seasonal food is also necessary in order to promote and support a more nature-friendly way of producing food.” Although organic foods are generally more expensive, a recent Dutch survey shows that the price difference between organic and conventional products dropped from 63% to 48% over 5 years, in part through increased scale in organic production and growing consumer demand.
To see a more direct impact on insect livability, it is essential to plant more insect-friendly plants in our own available space, preferably native wildflower mixtures. ‘This is especially important in urban areas where fragmented habitats result in a low presence of insects,” according to De Kroon. “The great thing is that the process happens quickly; as soon as the flowers bloom, you can see the insects buzzing around in no-time.”
Reversing the Decline
All of this leaves us with a damaged ecosystem in which the liveability for insects—and therefore the very chain of all life on Earth—is at stake. For a long time, we humans have adopted a God-like role, managing nature in a way where capitalist efficiency dictates the terms. This has led to a fragmented and fragile natural world, so gravely threatened that immediate action is required.
Europe, especially, should act as a leader in combating insect decline and restoring biodiversity, as it can implement coordinated measures on a continental scale. But growing anti-EU rhetoric—which goes hand in hand with portraying European nature and environmental rules as technocratic and harmful to farmers and the national economy—limits the required ambition to implement biodiversity policies.
But to enforce international change and raise awareness of the problem, we must start with ourselves when it comes to immediate action. We need to face our role in sustaining a toxic food system and in the loss of the green around us. The remarkable adaptability of nature in restored ecosystems gives us hope—but that hope can only flourish if we, too, learn to adapt.
Edited by Chelsea Bean
