I want to share a fact that should blow us all away: According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global pesticide use has just about doubled since 1990. This is already quite worrying—but I’m even more concerned by the question of where we’re headed from here, underscoring the need to scale the use of biopesticides by farmers globally.

Amid a warming global climate, some pest problems are getting worse, not better. In hotter conditions, pests can reproduce faster, sometimes adding a generation or more per growing season, which can make them more virulent and damaging. A team of international biology researchers projected that, under 2ºC of warming, increased pest damage could drive additional yield losses of 46 percent for wheat, 19 percent for rice, and 31 percent for maize.

And we can’t sustain more significant increases in pesticide use to compensate—because the health consequences simply cannot be ignored. Chronic exposure to these synthetic pesticides is linked to a variety of health issues from cancer to Parkinson’s disease, plus other endocrine disruptions and neurological issues. These chemicals are also devastating for biodiversity, threatening a variety of bird, bee, and other insect populations that are integral to the health of our food and climate systems.

At the same time as we’re seeing these ballooning rates of synthetic pesticide use, we have an off-ramp out of this downward spiral. We just need to use it.

As part of food production and land management models rooted in agroecology—including regenerative practices like cover cropping and rotation and policy structures that support climate-smart, biodiverse, community-centric farming—what really deserves more attention are biopesticides, which are derived from natural sources including bacteria, plants, animals, and certain minerals.

This makes them “inherently less toxic than conventional pesticides,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Rather than conventional pesticides that affect a broad spectrum of organisms, biopesticides are generally more targeted, are able to be applied in much smaller quantities, and decompose much more quickly and cleanly without necessarily affecting crop yields.

Read the full article about biopesticides by Danielle Nierenberg at Food Tank.