Climate change is creating “new vulnerabilities” for pandemics, according to new research.
The study, published in Science Advances, investigates nine zoonotic diseases – infections transmitted from animals to people – with high potential to cause severe public-health emergencies.
These diseases include the Zika virus, Ebola and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
Overall, the research finds that 9% of the planet’s land area is currently at “high” or “very high” risk of an outbreak of these diseases.
The study authors find that higher temperatures, increased rainfall and water scarcity are “key drivers” of disease outbreaks.
However, the paper has received a mixed reception from other scientists.
While one expert not involved in the study praises it for its novelty and rigour, another tells Carbon Brief that the research fails to capture some of the key drivers of zoonotic disease.
They tell Carbon Brief that “this idea that you can do a one-size-fits-all global risk assessment is just untrue”.
Zoonotic disease
There are more than 200 known “zoonotic diseases” – infections or diseases that are transmitted to humans from pets, livestock or wild animals.
Zoonotic diseases are spread when the pathogen that causes the disease – such as a virus, bacterium, fungus or parasite – moves from animals to humans. This can be through a bite, blood, saliva or faeces.
Lyme disease, rabies and bird flu are examples of well-known zoonotic diseases. One of the most well-known, Covid-19, is thought to have killed hundreds of thousands of people since the SARS-CoV-2 virus was first recorded in humans in 2019.
Pathogens are typically carried by animals, called hosts. For example, dogs are the main hosts of rabies.
The World Health Organization (WHO) keeps a list of “priority diseases” for research and development. These are zoonotic diseases that have the potential to cause severe public health emergencies, such as epidemics – in which there is a sharp rise in cases in a specific region – and pandemics, where a disease occurs over a very wide area and crosses borders.
The WHO updates its list regularly. It currently features the following zoonoses:
- Zika virus
- Ebola virus and Marburg virus disease
- SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)
- Covid-19
- Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever
- Lassa fever
- Nipah disease and henipaviral diseases
- Rift Valley fever
- “Disease X” (a label created by the WHO in 2018 to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic)
The number of new zoonotic diseases is increasing rapidly.
Many different factors can influence the spread of zoonotic diseases. One of the most important is climate. Pathogens and the animals that carry them typically thrive in a warm and wet climate, so many zoonotic diseases are found in tropical regions.
The frequency of contact between humans and animals is another important factor. This means that when people live close to areas of high biodiversity, such as forests, there is a higher risk of zoonotic disease transmission.
Mapping risk
The authors of the new study collected data on “outbreaks” of the WHO priority zoonotic diseases over 1975-2020 from the Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network.
They exclude Covid-19 from their analysis, although it is a WHO priority disease, because its “overwhelming prevalence” resulted in worldwide coverage, making it difficult to identify spatial patterns.
The database defines an outbreak as two or more linked cases of the same illness, a number of cases that exceeds the expected number, or a single case of disease “caused by a pathogen that poses a significant threat to public health”, the study explains.
The authors identified 131 outbreaks of infectious diseases with epidemic and pandemic potential over 1975-2020
The authors then used satellite data to identify nine “risk factors” that can affect the transmission of zoonotic diseases:
- Annual maximum temperature
- Annual minimum temperature
- Water deficit
- Annual total rainfall
- Livestock density
- Frequency of land-use change
- Change in proximity between humans and forests
- Biodiversity loss
- Human population density
The authors used a “predictive model”, which makes use of machine-learning techniques, to combine these variables. This allows them to determine the risk of climate outbreaks from the WHO priority diseases in different regions.
Finally, the authors adjusted their results to account for a bias in how data on disease outbreaks is recorded. In developed countries and regions, diseases are more likely to be detected and recorded, while this is less likely in developing regions.
The map below shows the risk of a disease breakout across the world from the nine WHO priority zoonotic diseases. Darker colours indicate greater risk, while white indicates regions where not enough data was available.
The map shows that the southern hemisphere of the planet has a higher risk of pandemic breakout than the northern hemisphere, “with the majority of those areas located in Latin America and Oceania”. Meanwhile, very little risk is seen in Europe and North America.
The authors find that 9% of the world’s land surface, home to around 130 million people, is at “very high” or “high” risk of outbreaks of the diseases.
Lead author Dr Angela Fanelli is a researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research Council. She tells Carbon Brief that “this study is the first to comprehensively examine the shared drivers of zoonotic diseases with epidemic and pandemic potential on a global scale”.
The authors also use data from the International Health Regulations to score countries based on their capacity to respond to zoonotic events at the animal-wildlife interface.
By integrating this data into their analysis, the authors developed an “epidemic risk index” which shows each country’s risk and capacity to respond to “zoonotic threats”. In this index, Papua New Guinea is ranked as the lowest – indicating the greatest risk of epidemics.
The full table is shown below, where a higher number indicates a greater risk of epidemics.
‘New vulnerabilities’
The authors went on to analyse the different factors that influence the risk of zoonotic breakout.
The charts below illustrate how, for most risk factors explored in the report, a higher value results in a greater risk score for zoonotic disease outbreak.
For example, the plot on the top left shows how higher maximum temperatures lead to a higher risk of disease outbreak.
The paper notes that higher temperature and annual rainfall levels “elevate the risk of disease outbreaks”. It suggests that this is because host species are better adapted to hotter, wetter conditions.
The paper also assesses water deficit, a measure that can capture the monthly differences between rainfall and potential evapotranspiration – the transfer of water from the ground into the air through a combination of evaporation and transpiration.
The authors find that “moderate water scarcity” is associated with the highest risk of outbreaks. This could be because moderate water scarcity can cause animals to group together around remaining water sources, allowing the pathogen to be transferred more easily, they suggest.
Meanwhile, they say that “excessively arid conditions” can cause the host population to die out, meaning the pathogen is unable to spread.
Fanelli tells Carbon Brief that the study highlights “several key mechanisms by which climate change could increase the risk of disease outbreaks”.
Climate change, she says, can make host populations “more susceptible to disease outbreaks” and result in water shortages that “compromise water quality, hygiene and sanitation, further increasing the risk of disease outbreaks.”
The authors warn that the changing climate is “creating new vulnerabilities” for zoonotic disease transmission as it “reshapes the geographic distribution of risk”.
The paper also finds that changes in land use can increase disease risk. When people cut down trees in areas of high biodiversity, they can suddenly come into contact with species that they do not usually interact with, providing an opportunity for pathogens to jump from humans to animals, the authors find.
Higher population densities of people or livestock are also linked to a higher risk of zoonotic diseases, because the pathogens are able to spread more easily.
Mixed reception
The study has received mixed responses from scientists not involved in the work.
Dr Ibrahima Diouf, a postdoctoral researcher on climate and health at Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop University, tells Carbon Brief that the research “offers a more holistic perspective” than studies that focus on a single disease and has a “sound, innovative and transparent” methodology.
He also praises the study for “bridg[ing] environmental modelling and public health planning”, and for capturing both hazard exposure and “national response capacity”. He says:
“This dual lens enables practical prioritisation of interventions. Countries like the Republic of Congo and Madagascar, which face both high risk and limited response capacity, emerge as key candidates for targeted support through regional or multilateral adaptation programmes.”
Dr Colin Carlson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, tells Carbon Brief that this type of work “has been done before”:
“We’ve seen a lot of these studies that look at a hundred or so outbreaks and then use machine learning – an approach that will almost always find some kind of signal – to confirm their hypothesis that environmental degradation drives disease outbreaks.”
Carlson also criticises the study’s methodology, arguing that the variables the authors chose focus on “intact tropical rainforests and other tropical ecosystems” that are “hot, wet, biodiverse [and] populated”. He continues:
“That’s where a lot of disease outbreaks are, but that’s true as much because of poverty as because of the environment, if not more.”
Carlson tells Carbon Brief that “this idea that you can do a one-size-fits-all global risk assessment is just untrue”.
He adds that the work contributes to a “narrative that spillover [of pathogens from animals to humans] is a problem of the global south – and that pandemics happen because the people living in these countries are somehow unengaged in outbreak prevention or unwilling to leave nature alone”.
In Carlson’s view, this narrative is “wrong”.
The post Climate change is creating ‘new vulnerabilities’ for disease pandemics appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change is creating ‘new vulnerabilities’ for disease pandemics
Climate Change
Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges
The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.
The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.
Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges
Amid reports that the government could weaken the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) targets, Carbon Brief analysis reveals the nation’s EV drivers are saving more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared with running a petrol car.
Battery EVs (BEVs) are roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars, making them far cheaper to run – particularly since the Iran crisis caused a spike in fossil-fuel prices.
The savings from driving BEVs are also more than three times higher than for “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs), which evidence shows are mostly driven with their combustion engines.
In total, the more than 2m BEVs, 1m PHEVs and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are saving drivers around £3bn a year, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, as illustrated in the figure below.
In addition, these EVs are avoiding the need for nearly 2.5bn litres of fuel and cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 7m tonnes each year.
Despite recent news that EVs are now cheaper to buy than petrol cars, as well as having far lower running costs, BBC News says the government is “set to water down” its EV sales targets.
The broadcaster explains that the current goal, under the UK’s “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) mandate, is for 80% of new car sales to be BEVs by 2030.
It says that the government is set to consult on weakening this to between 50% and 70%, following “lobbying” by carmakers and trade unions.
According to the Sunday Times, prime minister Keir Starmer “is understood to have overruled the energy secretary [Ed Miliband] after sustained pressure from industry, the Unite union and Peter Kyle, the business secretary”.
The car industry has consistently claimed there is insufficient demand for BEVs to meet the targets under the ZEV mandate, yet the government says manufacturers have “over-complied” to date. Independent analysts say the industry is on track to continue beating the ZEV mandate goals.
The industry has been able to beat its targets by using a wide range of “flexibilities”, which were introduced after a previous round of lobbying. These allow carmarkers to meet part of their EV targets by selling more efficient combustion cars, such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
The ZEV mandate is the single-largest part of the government’s plans to meet its legally binding climate goals over the next decade.
The advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) previously warned that the extra flexibilities would result in a larger number of hybrids being sold, at the expense of battery EVs.
When it consulted on the ZEV mandate in 2023, the then-Conservative government noted that PHEVs do not deliver the cost and CO2 savings they are advertised with.
It pointed to “dramatic” differences between the performance of PHEVs in test cycles and what they deliver under real-world conditions.
In practice, less than a third of miles driven in PHEVs are fuelled by electricity, with petrol making up the rest. As a result, cost and CO2 savings from BEVs are three times larger than for PHEVs.
The post Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total
Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the first carbon credits approved under a new UN mechanism, alleging the project is linked to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and has “massively” overstated its climate impact.
The programme, which aims to cut emissions by distributing efficient cookstoves across Myanmar, received approval to issue around 650,000 carbon credits from the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February, in a landmark moment for the Paris Agreement’s carbon market. Only two projects have been given the green light by the mechanism’s regulator so far.
But two reports published last week, led by the Global Forest Coalition and Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch, raised serious concerns about the project’s implementation in conflict zones where civilians have faced airstrikes and mass displacement as well as its emission-reduction calculations.
Project continued after military coup
Myanmar has been ravaged by a brutal civil war since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government in a coup d’état in February 2021. The military regime has attacked civilian populations, persecuted ethnic minorities and committed widespread sexual violence, among other serious human rights violations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said in April.
The cookstove programme started in 2018 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – as a partnership between Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) and the Climate Change Center (CCC), a South Korean NGO, with investment from private South Korean firms.
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The project continued operating after the coup. For most of the period between 2021 and 2022 in which the issued credits were generated, MONREC was led by Colonel Khin Maung Yi, who was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for supporting the military regime, the Global Forest Coalition report said.
CCC acknowledged engaging with government authorities after the coup but said this “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta. The South Korean NGO added that abandoning the programme when political circumstances changed “would not necessarily have been the most responsible outcome for the households involved”.
Conflict prevents on the ground verification
The Global Forest Coalition report raised particular concerns about the project’s implementation in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, including Sagaing Region, an anti-junta resistance stronghold that has been most heavily affected by the conflict and routinely targeted by airstrikes and violent attacks. The region accounts for more than a third of Myanmar’s 3.8 million internally displaced people.
The NGOs said that, in addition to ethical concerns about carbon credits being produced by the military government in an area actively affected by its attacks, this raises questions over the ability to effectively verify the climate integrity of the projects.
Before carbon credits are issued, external auditors need to validate the claims made by project developers and confirm that the emission reductions claimed are correct. This process usually includes site visits to a representative sample of households to check how the improved cookstoves are being used.
But, because of the “volatile political situation” in Myanmar, the auditing team was not able to leave the capital Yangon and could only speak to project participants remotely via Zoom, project documents show.
“Due to ongoing armed conflict on the ground, the data currently used to justify carbon credit issuance in Sagaing by the Burmese military junta is unverifiable and highly likely fraudulent,” said Zaw Tuseng, founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute, which contributed to the report, in a written statement. “This demands an immediate suspension of credit transfers until a neutral, conflict-sensitive audit can be conducted.”
“Exceptional circumstances”
CCC told Climate Home News that, although it recognises that on-site verification is “generally preferable, particularly in complex operating environments”, the decision to opt for remote controls was not taken “as a discretionary shortcut, but as an approved alternative under exceptional circumstances”.
The South Korean NGO added that it reviewed the feasibility of the project at community level “on an ongoing basis” and it “did not identify conflict-related incidents that directly affected project implementation activities in participating communities during the monitoring period”.
A spokesperson for the UN climate change body told Climate Home News that, when site access is not possible, the UN carbon credit mechanism allows for “alternative verification approaches while still maintaining conservative assumptions and environmental integrity safeguards”. “These provisions ensure that crediting can only proceed where evidence is reliable,” they added.
Contested methodology
Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods, both reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. But several cookstove offsetting projects have faced criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions.
The project in Myanmar uses a contested methodology developed under the earlier Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it found it “insufficiently rigorous”.
EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says
After transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project was required to apply “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, which resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued, according to the UN climate change body.
“The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism, said in February.
Too many credits issued
But Carbon Market Watch claimed in a second report last week that, despite the adjustment, the project is still likely to issue seven times more credits than its real climate impact justifies, comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.
The biggest driver of the credit inflation, the group said, is the failure to account for “stacking” – the widespread practice of households using multiple stoves at the same time, including more polluting ones the project does not monitor.
Peer-reviewed science considers a stacking rate of 68% a conservative assumption, but the methodology used by the Myanmar programme makes no allowance for it at all, the report said.
CCC disputed those findings. In a written response to Climate Home News, it said the project was developed under methodologies approved within the UN climate framework and that external recalculations by researchers are not “determinative of the level of crediting achieved”.
The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.
Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its own national climate plan under the Paris Agreement.
“Over-crediting, at any magnitude, cannot be compatible with the climate ambition of a world striving to limit global warming to 1.5ºC,” said Isa Mulder, an expert at Carbon Market Watch.
The post UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns
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