Insect Farming’s Environmental Benefits

Insect farming can benefit vulnerable populations. The potential of insect farming for vulnerable communities was demonstrated in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp. It was in this camp that an NGO, in collaboration with Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and financed by Danish Church Aid, trained refugees in cricket farming. The project started in 2017 with a pilot insect farm and training for 15 refugee household heads. By 2021, the project had trained more than 80 household heads in insect farming and processing techniques. These household heads—who have fled a diverse set of countries, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan—are now able to produce crickets for animal feed and human food, including for their own consumption. Danish Church Aid plans to scale up the initiative by training more farmers and distributing cricket rearing starter kits to more refugee households. This project shows the potential for insect farming to provide livelihoods and incomes for marginalized communities.

INSECT FARMING’S ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS

This section examines the environmental benefits of insect farming. It finds that replacing livestock rearing with insect farming can drastically reduce the emission of harmful GHGs, and that insect farming can efficiently dispose of human and industrial waste, protect endangered plant and wildlife, and contribute to soil health when insect frass is used as fertilizer.

Current food systems contribute to environmental degradation and climate change. There is a growing global recognition that food systems must be reformed to solve the climate and environmental crisis. This is because agriculture has detrimental impacts on natural environments and contributes to climate change. Emerging analyses of how healthy and sustainable diets are obtained support this. Over the past decade, the FAO has focused on how national dietary recommendations can account for GHG emissions, land and water use, and other environmental impacts (Fischer and Garnett 2016).

Insect farming produces fewer GHG emissions and uses less water than traditional livestock production. Insects produce high-quality animal protein with up to 20 times fewer GHG emissions than ruminant livestock, and up to half the emissions of poultry production per kilogram of edible protein (Halloran, Roos, Eilenberg, et al. 2016; Smetana et al. 2016; Halloran 2017; van Huis and Oonincx 2017; Oonincx and de Boer 2012). As such, insect farming could shape future sustainable food systems and contribute to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (box 3.1). Farmed insect species also require little water compared with livestock (Miglietta et al. 2015). These insects are produced in high densities, thereby requiring little space and leaving less land vulnerable to exploitation. This is because insects thrive in colonies with very high population densities. In the face of the world’s increased demand for protein combined with livestock farming’s high GHG emissions, insects represent a promising alternative animal protein source for human food and animal feed (van Huis et al. 2013; van Huis 2019).

BOX 3.1 Insect Farming and the Sustainable Development Goals

Insect farming can address many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by doing the following: • Supporting livelihood and income diversification—SDG 1 • Providing access to high-quality animal source foods (ASF)—SDG 2 • Providing new livelihood opportunities for men and women—SDG 5 • Reducing waste streams through bioconversion—SDG 6 • Creating jobs in the agriculture and agricultural food sectors—SDG 8 • Fostering innovation and developing a sustainable new industry—SDG 9 • Converting low-grade waste streams into high-quality ASF—SDG 12 • Providing high-quality ASF that emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions—SDG 13 • Providing an alternative to soybean meal and fishmeal in animal feed—SDG 14 • Helping conserve wild insect populations—SDG 15 • Developing multistakeholder partnerships in a new sector—SDG 17

Emissions

Insect farming can reduce GHG emissions. A study in Indonesia found that composting segregated kitchen waste with BSFL can reduce direct carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) emissions by 47 times and reduce global warming potential (GWP) by half (Mertenat, Diener, and Zurbrügg 2019). Substituting fishmeal with BSFL meal in animal feed can reduce the GWP by up to 30 percent (Mertenat, Diener, and Zurbrügg 2019). Another study showed that using BSFL meal instead of soybean meal in pig feeds reduced GWP by 10 percent and required 56 percent less land (van Zanten et al. 2018).

Cricket farming also produces lower GHG emissions compared with traditional livestock. A life-cycle assessment of a fully commercialized cricket farming system in Thailand documented that cricket production had 1.5 times fewer GHG emissions than broiler chicken production (figure 3.3), which already has low emission rates compared with ruminant livestock, like cattle (Halloran et al. 2017). The study also found that scaling up cricket farming systems and feeding the crickets efficiently would reduce the system’s overall environmental impacts. The main contributors to GWP from insect production were the energy use from heating the insect farms and growing crops to produce insect substrates, such as maize or soybeans (Joensuu and Silvenius 2017; Arru et al. 2019).

Another study shows that insect consumption would reduce GHG emissions. The 2019 study used a country-specific model for healthy, sustainable diets, based on food supply data available from the FAO food statistics database (Kim et al. 2019). In this model, food supply data for 140 countries and nine different scenarios of modified diets for the entire populations were modeled by maintaining a sufficient supply of protein, micronutrients,