How climate change has triggered locust plagues across East Africa

Global warming has created the conditions for vast swarms of insects on a scale not seen in living memory.

Locusts swarm from ground vegetation as people approach at Lerata village, near Archers Post in Samburu county, approximately 300 kilomters (186 miles) north of kenyan capital, Nairobi on January 22, 2020. - "Ravenous swarms" of desert locusts in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, already unprecedented in their size and destructive potential, threaten to ravage the entire East Africa subregion, the UN warned on January 20, 2020. The outbreak of desert locusts, considered the most dangerous locust species, is significant and extremely dangerous warned the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, describing the infestation as an eminent threat to food security in months to come if control measures are not taken. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP) (Photo by TONY KARUMBA/AFP via Getty Images)

Something substantial hits my helmet visor as I bump along familiar roads on the back of a motorbike taxi to the office one morning. “Oh no,” I think, “they’re here”. As it turns out, it was only a flower from one of the many bougainvilleas that line my route to work. But, like many people here in Kenya, I immediately thought “locust”.

A vast swarm of the grasshoppers is heading south through East Africa, and it has reached Kenya. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) identified one swarm in Kenya that measured around 2,400 sq km – roughly the size of Luxembourg – and may contain up to 200 billion insects.