TY  - JOUR
T1  - Integrated Pest Management for an Age of Deep Uncertainty: Adaptive Decisions under Climate Volatility, Biological Invasion, and Farmer Constraints
A1  - Sarah Jensen
A1  - Pieter Vos
A1  - Lars Olsen
JF  - Entomology and Applied Science Letters
JO  - Entomol Appl Sci Lett
SN  - 2349-2864
Y1  - 2026
VL  - 13
IS  - 1
DO  - 10.51847/9mbdnovPZy
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
N2  - Integrated pest management must increasingly operate under conditions in which future pest pressure, intervention performance, ecological feedback, and implementation capacity cannot be represented by a single reliable forecast. Climate volatility can alter pest phenology, geographic suitability, crop susceptibility, and natural-enemy performance, while biological invasions can introduce unfamiliar species combinations for which historical thresholds and management assumptions are unreliable. At the same time, farmers differ in labour, capital, knowledge, service access, and tolerance of uncertain losses, meaning that theoretically preferable strategies may not be operationally feasible. This article develops an original, explicitly non-validated governance synthesis for adaptive integrated pest management under such deep uncertainty. The approach integrates evidence concerning uncertainty classification, climate-sensitive pest-system instability, biological invasion, novel pest assemblages, farmer constraints, intervention choice, monitoring, learning, resistance, and institutional coordination. The central synthesis is that uncertainty should neither be treated as a reason for decision paralysis nor concealed through false precision. Instead, integrated pest-management decisions should be organized as conditional and revisable choices: uncertainty is characterized, feasible intervention portfolios are selected, biological and operational signals are monitored, and actions are retained or revised through explicit decision rules. This logic preserves four essential distinctions: forecast uncertainty is not an absence of actionable information; theoretical optimality is not farmer feasibility; monitoring is not adaptive learning unless it changes or prospectively justifies retaining a decision; and short-term pest suppression is not evidence of resilient programme performance. The evidence base remains heterogeneous across crops, pests, regions, modelling approaches, and institutional settings, and many proposed relations have not been evaluated prospectively. The principal implication is therefore to design pest-management governance around robustness, reversibility, feasibility screening, calibrated monitoring, transparent trade-offs, and institutional capacity for repeated learning rather than around fixed prescriptions.
UR  - https://easletters.com/article/integrated-pest-management-for-an-age-of-deep-uncertainty-adaptive-decisions-under-climate-volatili-we5skd9pqrwwyym
ER  -