This video is sponsored by ExpressVPN. To find out how to get three months free, click here: ExpressVPN.com/Vox In a region where food is already scarce, billions of insects are now eating everything in sight. Become a Video Lab member! bit.ly/video-lab Since late 2019, East Africa and the Middle East have been experiencing their worst locust outbreaks in decades. A small locust swarm can eat more food than 35,000 people; but some locust swarms in the area have grown to over two thousand times that size. And it’s all coming right on the heels of a season of catastrophic flooding in the region. But that isn’t a coincidence: The desert locust thrives when dry weather turns wet. And in 2018 and 2019, a series of freak weather events brought record-setting rainfall to the Middle East and East Africa. The result of all this is a region at risk of a famine, in the middle of a pandemic. And because freak weather is a hallmark of climate change, it’s also the kind of thing we can expect to happen again. Further reading / watching: Read Vox.com science reporter Umair Irfan’s article on the locust outbreak: www.vox.com/2020/5/20/21158283/locust-plague-swarm-outbreak-africa-asia-2020 One of the things that helped prime the region for locusts was an unusually strong Indian Ocean Dipole. Watch our piece about that here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYX9ahqceAI For more information on the locust upsurge, see the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s website: www.fao.org/ag/locusts/en/info/info/986/index.html And this FAO press conference from February helped me answer a lot of the questions in this piece: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HEKBAack9g Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out www.vox.com. Watch our full video catalog: goo.gl/IZONyE Follow Vox on Facebook: goo.gl/U2g06o Or Twitter: goo.gl/XFrZ5H

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