Insects make up approximately 80 percent of all animals and comprise an estimated 5.5 million species. Recently, the insect decline debate has thrust insects into the spotlight of mainstream media, highlighting their importance to human wellbeing through ecosystem functions and services such as pollination, pest control, nutrient cycling and decomposition, but also their potentially drastic declines, jeopardising these services and ecosystem integrity as a whole. Among the likely drivers of declining insect populations are climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation, agricultural intensification, urbanisation, as well as light and air pollution. Especially in the tropics, where most of insect abundance, biomass and richness if found, there is a paucity of data on insects. We only know little about how many species of tropical insects there are, how they are distributed and what natural history they have, how global change impacts on insect diversity, and to what extent insects are experiencing changing populations in the tropics and what consequences this has for ecosystem functions and services. In this symposium, we would like to showcase recent research on insect across the tropics, covering likely threats to insects and how they might be better protected in the future, what factors contribute to their distributions, their role in human-modified landscapes as well as their importance for ecosystem services. Specifically, we present a diverse set of entomological studies, from the importance of global protected areas for insects, over the effects of habitat modification, fragmentation, and environmental predictors on dung beetles across Malaysia, the importance of dung beetles as bioindicators in tea plantations in Sri Lanka to the role of nocturnal moths in pollen transport in Central Congo peatlands. These talks will be the basic for further discussions on what we know and don’t know about insects in the tropics, how we might be able to fill knowledge gaps, and what we can do to advocate tropical insect research in the future. We are confident that this symposium will attract further speakers with insects as their target organisms.