%0 Journal Article
%T When Historical Economic Thresholds Meet Climate Volatility: Rethinking Pest Intervention Timing for Dynamic and Unequal Agroecosystems
%A Ethan Marshall
%A Noor Al-Harbi
%A Kevin Brooks
%J Entomology and Applied Science Letters
%@ 2349-2864
%D 2025
%V 12
%N 2
%R 10.51847/BOziaNsmDX
%P 79-89
%X Economic thresholds remain central to integrated pest management because they connect pest observation with the timing of economically justified intervention. Yet many operational thresholds were developed under assumptions of relatively stable pest development, crop response, production costs, market conditions, monitoring capacity, and intervention performance. Climate volatility increasingly destabilizes these assumptions by altering pest phenology, overwintering survival, voltinism, dispersal, host–pest synchrony, crop tolerance, and natural-enemy regulation. This methodological perspective examines how economic-threshold logic can be reformulated without treating dynamic adjustment as already validated practice. It integrates evidence concerning the historical assumptions of thresholds, climatic effects on pest development, crop-value variation, farmer capacity, unequal exposure to decision error, natural-enemy activity, monitoring costs, forecasting, and advisory-system design. The synthesis indicates that pest abundance alone cannot represent expected economic injury and that climatic forecasts cannot determine intervention timing without information on crop state, injury potential, control feasibility, ecological regulation, and decision uncertainty. A climate-responsive threshold should therefore be understood as a conditional decision structure rather than a universally transferable pest-density value. Its components require repeated updating, explicit uncertainty representation, and separation between biological warning, economic justification, and feasible action. Important limitations include inconsistent threshold evidence, species- and location-specific climate responses, unequal monitoring resources, uncertain transferability, and limited field validation of integrated dynamic rules. The principal implication is that future threshold systems should be co-designed as transparent, updateable decision processes whose recommendations remain conditional on local ecological and socioeconomic evidence. Such systems could improve intervention timing, but their benefits must be evaluated before they are represented as locally effective or operationally equitable.
%U https://easletters.com/article/when-historical-economic-thresholds-meet-climate-volatility-rethinking-pest-intervention-timing-for-efd7rcjohdndsd5