It’s surprising how little we know about the insects that inhabit our planet. As many as 80% may not even have been discovered yet, and the majority of the world’s estimated 5.5 million species are thought to live in tropical regions where, to date, little research has been carried out.

The tropics – including the Amazon rainforest, all of Brazil and much of Africa, India and south-east Asia – are also where the combined effects of climate change and habitat loss are being experienced most profoundly. Which is bad news for the cocoa farmers of Indonesia, for example, whose crops are primarily pollinated by midges, a group of flies better known in the UK for bedevilling camping trips in Scotland.

In this Insights long read, the authors of a new UCL study – one of the biggest global assessments of changes in insect biodiversity – reveal that intensively farmed land in these tropical regions is suffering some dramatic species collapses. They also point out that, as consumers, we all have a role to play in reducing these declines – for example, by buying shade-grown cocoa and coffee that have less impact on biodiversity.

For anyone who’s ever hired someone for a job, we’ve also got new evidence on the thorny question: should you choose the better-qualified candidate, or the one you have more in common with? And we’ve asked a professor of philosophy to tell us if Boris Johnson is lying about Partygate. Now that really is a tough question.

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