The environmental sustainability of insects as food and feed. A review
By A. van Huis, D. Oonincx. Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 2017
871 citations recorded by the source corpus.
With a growing world population, increasingly demanding consumers, and a limited amount of agricultural land, there is an urgent need to find alternatives to conventional meat products. Livestock production is, moreover, a leading cause of anthropogenic-induced climate change. To mediate this, more sustainable diets are needed, with reduced meat consumption or the use of alternative protein sources. Insects are promoted as human food and animal feed worldwide. In tropical countries, edible insects are harvested from nature, but overexploitation, habitat changes, and environmental contamination threaten this food resource. Therefore, sustainable harvesting practices need to be developed and implemented. We provide examples of (1) aquatic insects whose populations are threatened by pollution, (2) caterpillar species in Africa that are disappearing due to overexploitation and habitat change, (3) edible insects species that are considered pests in agro-ecosystems, and (4) edible insect species that can be conserved and enhanced in forest management systems. Insect farming can be conducted either on small-scale farms or in large-scale industrialized rearing facilities. We review the environmental sustainability of insect farming compared to livestock production. The major environmental advantages of insect farming compared to livestock production are as follows: (1) less land and water is required; (2) greenhouse gas emissions are lower; (3) insects have high feed conversion efficiencies; (4) insects can transform low-value organic by-products into high-quality food or feed; and (5) certain insect species can be used as animal feed or aqua feed. For instance, they can replace fish meal, which is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. However, edible insect species intended for production should be screened for risks to humans, animals, plants, and biodiversity.
Subfields: Insect Science, Marketing, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f53b21209bccc3fe97516e23a1980ea6f5bfe84
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Citations in the corpus
- Australian Consumers’ Response to Insects as Food (2019, background): “Many studies have also shown that farming insects has a higher feed-conversion efficiency, requiring less space and water, thereby having an overall smaller ecological footprint compared to livestock production [6,9,18].”
- Insect-Based Bioconversion: Value from Food Waste (2019, background): “…for reducing food waste that are fiscally manageable, modest both in space and energy requirements, environmentally friendly, associated with real market/ commercial opportunities, and yielding higher feed conversion ratios than conventional livestock (Li et al. 2013; van Huis and Oonincx 2017).”
- Insect and fish by-products as sustainable alternatives to conventional animal proteins in animal nutrition (2020, background): “In addition, they seem to have a low environmental impact in terms of land use and water consumption (Dobermann et al. 2017; van Huis and Oonincx 2017), even though available environmental studies and Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are still limited (Mertenat et al. 2019).”
- Larvae Mediated Valorization of Industrial, Agriculture and Food Wastes: Biorefinery Concept through Bioconversion, Processes, Procedures, and Products (2020, background): “Insect-rearing for food and feed purposes has several advantages: from an environmental standpoint, insect rearing requires less area to produce 1 kg of protein compared to conventional protein sources, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and the bioconversion of waste organic side streams to high-valu”