Climate Change Is Pushing Butterflies and Their Host Plants Out of Sync

Insects and the plants they depend on are migrating in response to climate change, but not always in the same way.

Butterflies are often considered bellwether species for climate change, and to retain the cooler climates they need for their life cycles, species around the world have been shifting their habitats and migratory patterns to higher latitudes and higher elevations.

But are the plants that butterflies depend on shifting their habitats in step?

New research has found that out of 24 Southeast Asian butterflies examined, 17 of them (71%) could experience a net loss in the habitat area they share with their host plants under a high-emissions climate change scenario. Some butterfly species may lose nearly 40% of shared habitat as they retreat to cooler climes.

Losing Ground

Like most species on Earth, butterflies have a preferred temperature range. As climate change warms the planet, many butterfly species have shifted their habitats, typically moving to cooler, higher elevations or higher latitudes. But wherever they go, butterflies still need plants that provide food and host their larvae (caterpillars). Some butterflies depend on a single host species, while others can rely on several.

Plants, too, have environmental needs, but whether the insects and the plants they need are shifting their habitats at the same speeds and in the same direction has been unclear.

To compare shifting species ranges, researchers simulated how tropical Asian butterflies and their host plants would each experience habitat migration in response to a high-emissions climate change scenario (SSP585). They selected 24 butterfly species whose ranges span from dense lowland rainforests to mountainous highlands. Some species have large ranges, and others have small ranges. Some depend on a single host plant, and others can use several.

“We wanted to choose the most representative butterfly species in tropical Asia,” said Jin Chen, lead researcher on the project and a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki. “We only used climate data as the predictive factors. We wanted to see, in the worst situation, what happens to them.”

They found that 17 of the 24 butterfly species would experience a net decoupling from their host plants, with shared habitat area decreasing between 6% and 39%. As expected, the decoupling in lowland areas was primarily driven by butterflies fleeing to cooler, higher-elevation areas.

“I don’t think there’s any situation [in which] a butterfly will prefer to go a warmer place,” Chen said.

But the model also predicted significant habitat decoupling in those cooler, higher-elevation regions, which was unexpected. The loss of shared highland habitat was primarily driven by the host plants not being able to thrive there, and as a result, the butterflies had no support system when they arrived. Butterfly species that are pickier about their plants experienced the biggest coupled habitat losses.

“The hot spots of this decoupling are mostly in the mountain regions of tropical Asia, including Borneo and the boundary of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia,” Chen said, as well as “the north of Myanmar close to the Himalayas.”

The model did predict that seven butterfly species would gain shared habitat with plants, with net gains of 1%–42%. Those gains were a result of several host plants expanding their ranges significantly in a warmer climate. The butterflies that relied on those plants had more options despite their own habitat shifts.

The team presented their results on 15 December at AGU’s Annual Meeting 2025 in New Orleans.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in how butterflies are responding or will respond to climate change globally—and this is especially true in the tropics where data are generally sparse and species interactions complex,” said Timothy Bonebrake, a conservation scientist at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved with this research. “But yes, there is evidence that Asian species are shifting their distributions in response to warming and other environmental changes.”

“What role host plants play in such movements is less clear and needs further investigation,” he added. “So studies like this that model host and butterfly responses are a useful first step for understanding such impacts.”

Fluttering Away

“Modeling species interactions under global change can provide important perspectives for managers and conservation planners by emphasizing key linkages in the ecosystem,” Bonebrake said. “Indeed, for many butterfly species, host plant availability will be a key limiting factor that constrains distribution tracking. Research like this can help to identify which types of species might need attention or active intervention under rapid warming.”

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Chen noted that because the team’s model used only climate change as a predictive factor, it might not have fully captured how plant ranges will change. Although temperature shifts, driven by climate change, are the most important factor for butterflies, plants also respond to land use changes, she said. Future modeling will include predicted land use change under different emissions scenarios and thus will provide more precise predictions about which butterfly species could thrive or falter.

Still, these initial models provide clues about which species are under more threat than others and can spark ideas about how humans can intervene to protect vulnerable pollinators. People living in cooler areas to which butterflies are fleeing can help support the insects by protecting their host plants from destructive land use and by planting more pollinator-friendly plants to support butterflies’ life cycles.

“We sometimes underestimate the ability of butterflies to switch host plants or otherwise alter their life histories to cope with climate change,” Bonebrake said. “When they do shift hosts, it introduces an additional element of complexity with respect to climate change projections. But hopefully, this ability will also give species an additional avenue for persisting in rapidly changing environments.”

This article originally appeared in Eos Magazine.