Climate change could lead to half a million more deaths from malaria in Africa over the next 25 years, according to new research.
The study, published in Nature, finds that extreme weather, rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns could result in an additional 123m cases of malaria across Africa – even if current climate pledges are met.
The authors explain that as the climate warms, “disruptive” weather extremes, such as flooding, will worsen across much of Africa, causing widespread interruptions to malaria treatment programmes and damage to housing.
These disruptions will account for 79% of the increased malaria transmission risk and 93% of additional deaths from the disease, according to the study.
The rest of the rise in malaria cases over the next 25 years is due to rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns, which will change the habitable range for the mosquitoes that carry the disease, the paper says.
The majority of new cases will occur in areas already suitable for malaria, rather than in new regions, according to the paper.
The study authors tell Carbon Brief that current literature on climate change and malaria “often overlooks how heavily malaria risk in Africa is today shaped by climate-fragile prevention and treatment systems”.
The research shows the importance of ensuring that malaria control and primary healthcare is “resilient” to the extreme weather, they say.
Malaria in a warming world
Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 610,000 people died due to the disease in 2024.
In 2024, Africa was home to 95% of malaria cases and deaths. Children under the age of five made up three-quarters of all African malaria deaths.
The disease is transmitted to humans by bites from mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite. The insects thrive in high temperatures of around 29C and need stagnant or slow-moving water in which to lay their eggs. As such, the areas where malaria can be transmitted are heavily dependent on the climate.
There is a wide body of research exploring the links between climate change and malaria transmission. Studies routinely find that as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift, the area of suitable land for malaria transmission is expanding across much of the world.
Study authors Prof Peter Gething and Prof Tasmin Symons are researchers at the Curtin University’s school of population health and the Malaria Atlas Project from the The Kids Research Institute, Australia.
They tell Carbon Brief that this approach does not capture the full picture, arguing that current literature on climate change and malaria “often overlooks how heavily malaria risk in Africa is today shaped by climate-fragile prevention and treatment systems”.
The paper notes that extreme weather events are regularly linked to surges in malaria cases across Africa and Asia. This is, in-part, because storms, heavy rainfall and floods leave pools of standing water where mosquitoes can breed. For example, nearly 15,000 cases of malaria were reported in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai hitting Mozambique in 2019.
However, the study authors also note that weather extremes often cause widespread disruption, which can limit access to healthcare, damage housing or disrupt preventative measures such as mosquito nets. These factors can all increase vulnerability to malaria, driving the spread of the disease.
In their study, the authors assess both the “ecological” effects of climate change – the impacts of temperature and rainfall changes on mosquito populations – and the “disruptive” effects of extreme weather.
Mosquito habitat
To assess the ecological impacts of climate change, the authors first identify how temperature, rainfall and humidity affect mosquito lifecycles and habitats.
The authors combine observational data on temperature, humidity and rainfall, collected over 2000-22, with a range of datasets, including mosquito abundance and breeding habitat.
The authors then use malaria infection prevalence data, collected by the Malaria Atlas Project, which describes the levels of infection in children aged between two and 10 years old.
Symons and Gething explain that they can then use “sophisticated mathematical models” to convert infection prevalence data into estimates of malaria cases.
Comparing these datasets gives the authors a baseline, showing how changes in climate have affected the range of mosquitoes and malaria rates across Africa in the early 21st century.
The authors then use global climate models to model future changes over 2024-49 under the SSP2-4.5 emissions pathway – which the authors describe as “broadly consistent with current international pledges on reduced greenhouse gas emissions”.
The authors also ran a “counterfactual” scenario, in which global temperatures do not increase over the next 25 years. By comparing malaria prevalence in their scenarios with and without climate change, the authors could identify how many malaria cases were due to climate change alone.
Overall, the ecological impacts of climate change will result in only a 0.12% increase in malaria cases by the year 2050, relative to present-day levels, according to the paper.
However, the authors say that this “minimal overall change” in Africa’s malaria rates “masks extensive geographical variation”, with some areas seeing a significant increase in malaria rates and others seeing a decrease.
Disruptive extremes
In contrast, the study estimates that 79% of the future increase in malaria transmission will be due to the “disruptive” impacts of more frequent and severe weather extremes.
The authors explain that extreme weather events, such as flooding and cyclones, can cause extensive damage to housing, leaving people without crucial protective equipment such as mosquito nets.
It can also destroy other key infrastructure, such as roads or hospitals, preventing people from accessing healthcare. This means that in the aftermath of an extreme weather event, people face a greater risk of being infected with malaria.
The climate models run by the study authors project an increase in “disruptive” extreme weather events over the next 25 years.
For example, the authors find that by the middle of the century, cyclones forming in the Indian Ocean will become more intense, with fewer category 1 to category 4 events, but more frequent category 5 events. They also find that climate change will drive an increase in flooding across Africa.
The study finds that without mitigation measures, these disruptive events will drive up the risk of malaria – especially in “main river systems” and the “cyclone-prone coastal regions of south-east Africa”.
Between 2024 and 2050, 67% of people in Africa will see their risk of catching malaria increase as a result of climate change, the study estimates.
The map below shows the percentage change in malaria transmission rate in the 2040s due to the disruptive impacts of climate change alone (left) and a combination of the disruptive and ecological impacts (right), compared to a scenario in which there is no change in the climate. Red and yellow indicate an increase in malaria risk, while blue indicates a reduction.
Colours in lighter shading indicate lower model confidence, while stronger colours indicate higher model confidence.
The maps show that the “disruptive” effects of climate change have a more uniform effect, driving up malaria risk across the entire continent.
However, there is greater regional variation when these effects are combined with “ecological” drivers.
The authors find that warming will increase malaria risk in regions where the temperature is currently too low for mosquitoes to survive. This includes the belt of lower latitude southern Africa, including Angola, southern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia, as well as highland areas in Burundi, eastern DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda.
Meanwhile, they find that warming will drive down malaria transmission in the Sahel, as temperatures rise above the optimal range for mosquitoes.
Rising risk
The combined “disruptive” and “ecological” impacts of climate change will drive an additional 123m “clinical cases” of malaria across Africa, even if the current climate pledges are met, the study finds.
This will result in 532,000 additional deaths from malaria over the next 25 years, if the disease’s mortality rate remains the same, the authors warn.
The graph below shows the increase in clinical cases of malaria projected across Africa over the next 25 years, broken down into the different ecological (yellow) and disruptive (purple) drivers of malaria risk.
However, the authors stress that there are many other mechanisms through which climate change could affect malaria transmission – for example, through food insecurity, conflict, economic disruption and climate-driven migration.
“Eradicating malaria in the first half of this century would be one of the greatest accomplishments in human history,” the authors say.
They argue that accomplishing this will require “climate-resilient control strategies”, such as investing in “climate-resilient health and supply-chain infrastructure” and enhancing emergency early warning systems for storms and other extreme weather.
Dr Adugna Woyessa is a senior researcher at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that the new paper could help inform national malaria programmes across Africa.
He also suggests that the findings could be used to guide more “local studies that address evidence gaps on the estimates of climate change-attributed malaria”.
Study authors Symons and Gething tell Carbon Brief that during their study, they interviewed “many policymakers and implementers across Africa who are already grappling with what climate-resilient malaria intervention actually looks like in practice”.
These interventions include integrating malaria control into national disaster risk planning, with emergency responses after floods and cyclones, they say. They also stress the need to ensure that community health workers are “well-stocked in advance of severe weather”.
The research shows the importance of ensuring that malaria control and primary healthcare is “resilient” to the extreme weather, they say.
The post Climate change could lead to 500,000 ‘additional’ malaria deaths in Africa by 2050 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change could lead to 500,000 ‘additional’ malaria deaths in Africa by 2050
Scientists have vowed to keep working on the next flagship set of reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), after a political row over the timeline for their release saw its latest session suspended on Friday evening without agreement.
During the weekend, government officials and scientists alike expressed disappointment over the inability to reach a compromise before some delegates from developing countries and small island states had to leave the week-long meeting in Ethiopia to catch flights home.
The disagreement – which has persisted since early 2024 – turns on whether the three key parts of the AR7 assessment should all be published before the conclusion of the UN’s next Global Stocktake of global climate action, which is due to be completed in late 2028.
The IPCC issued a statement after the close of the session, saying that “key agenda items” – the timelines for the three AR7 reports, as well as the IPCC budget – remain open and under discussion. It said the IPCC’s plenary session and its deliberations on the pending agenda “will resume at the earliest opportunity”, giving no further details of when.
IPCC Chair Jim Skea told delegates in closing remarks that recent months had been some of the most turbulent for the climate science panel and that, if there were stronger words than “profound disappointment” he would use them, according to a summary published by the Earth Negotiators Bulletin (ENB). IPCC discussions happen behind closed doors.
IPCC scientists remained committed
In an open letter, issued on Monday, a group of nearly 120 scientists – from a total of 664 AR7 authors – said they “stand committed to continue working to deliver the AR7 reports in a manner that is rigorous, timely and inclusive, in line with our mandate to be policy-relevant”.
“An assessment that arrives after the decisions it is meant to inform cannot serve its purpose,” they emphasised. “The second Global Stocktake in 2028 is such a decision point, and the world should not have to face it without the IPCCʼs latest assessment.”
Europe, small islands and the least developed countries, plus many Latin American and developed nations, want the IPCC to meet this deadline, arguing that the findings from the UN climate science body are irreplaceable in the UN climate policy-making process.
However, around a dozen developing countries plus Russia have argued that the reports should come later in order to allow for greater research input from the Global South – something that, in their view, would make the findings fairer. They also claim that a shorter timeline would put excessive pressure on experts.
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Who shapes climate science? The equity question facing the IPCC
Early completion of the next global climate science assessment reports risks excluding research from the Global South, which is key to ensuring the findings are fair -
Governments that support climate science must stand firm against naysayers
The IPCC is meeting to decide the timing of its next major report, as some countries try to delay it and weaken the case for faster emissions cuts
The most vocal of this group at last week’s meeting were India and Saudi Arabia, according to the ENB summary and a developed country diplomat. Critics see this push for a longer timeline as an excuse to deprive government decision-makers of the latest science and ease pressure on emerging economies to raise their ambition, particularly on cutting emissions.
Commenting on last week’s meeting, France’s ambassador for climate negotiations Benoît Faraco said a broad coalition of developed and developing countries from all five continents, “united in their support for science and the timeline proposed by scientists”, had withstood pressure “from a few countries” seeking to slow down the process of adopting the IPCC reports.
He added that France would not back down and would “continue to fight tirelessly for science, protect the integrity of information, and convince our partners that without the best available scientific data, we will be less effective in tackling climate change and protecting our populations”.
Inclusivity proposal stalled
In a bid to unlock a solution for the AR7 timeline, countries discussed ways to improve the inclusivity of the IPCC’s work. One option put on the table was for the IPCC to expand its funding for delegates from developing countries to attend some or all of its sessions from one to two participants, according to the ENB summary and a delegate speaking to Climate Home News.
That would increase the costs for the IPCC to complete AR7 by up to a quarter, according to an assessment shared by the secretariat. The panel’s budget is under severe strain and its officials have warned that, without additional voluntary contributions, it risks running out of money before it can deliver on this assessment cycle.
Climate Home News understands that some of the IPCC’s traditional donors – which mainly include European countries, Japan and Australia – indicated a willingness to support funding for an additional developing country participant. But without an agreement over the budget or the timeline for the reports, that option was ultimately not adopted.
‘Disappointed and worried’
The three reports are managed by working groups that collate and draw overall findings from the latest scientific studies and data on the physical effects of global warming around the world, how to adapt to it, and pathways for cutting planet-heating emissions in order to meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
Winston Chow, an urban climate professor at Singapore Management University who co-chairs Working Group II on adaptation, wrote in a LinkedIn post that he was “disappointed and worried” for the IPCC authors who have worked “extraordinarily hard” to assess the relevant climate science over the past two years.
He said he shared their concern that “the rigour, time and goodwill they’ve invested are now being put at risk by the Panel’s stalemate”.
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For Working Group II, a meeting for 250 experts writing that report is scheduled for January 2027, followed by the approval of a special report on cities and climate change in Singapore next March.
But because the IPCC’s budget has not been confirmed due to uncertainty about the AR7 schedule, travel support for those researchers is at risk, wrote Chow. “If they cannot participate, our assessments will lose vital expertise, perspectives and scientific breadth, and the collective effort of our authors will be undermined,” he warned.
Scientific work continues
Despite the political holdups, he – together with French climate scientist Robert Vautard, co-chair of Working Group 1 – agreed with IPCC head Skea who told the IPCC’s closing session on Friday: “The engine room of the IPCC is working, and it’s healthy.”
Vautard commented in a separate post on LinkedIn after it ended: “The boat is at full steam.” Working groups I and II are due to start revising the first drafts of their reports, while Working Group III on reducing emissions is finalising its first draft which will be out soon, he wrote.
“The most exciting two years of the cycle are ahead, for the authors. The momentum in the engine room is here and now. Trust the engine room!” he added.
The IPCC and some scientists report that progress has been made towards achieving an equitable balance of authors from the Global North and the Global South.
The group of researchers who signed the open letter on Monday noted that “inclusivity is at the heart of how we work”, with author teams bringing together experts from developed and developing countries with diverse backgrounds and at different stages of their careers.
Plea to overcome political differences
The signatories include several scientists from some of the countries opposed to the alignment of all IPCC reports with the Global Stocktake.
“We are committed to an assessment in which the knowledge, experience and priorities of every region are fully reflected, a commitment we share with the leadership of the IPCC.
Equity is built into how our assessment is being drafted,” they added.
They appealed to governments that make up the IPCC “to overcome their political differences and work together as we do as a global scientific community, so that we can deliver the IPCC reports the world needs to hear”.
In a statement published on Monday, IPCC chair Skea said reaching consensus on the schedule for the reports is “vital”. He added that the assessments provide authoritative scientific evidence to inform national climate policies, strengthen adaptation and resilience and support access to climate finance, as well as helping communicate the scale of the climate crisis and the urgency of efforts to tackle it.
The post IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock appeared first on Climate Home News.
IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock
An Lambrechts is a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International with extensive experience in biodiversity-related multilateral negotiations. She is the head of the Greenpeace delegation at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17 happening in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 2022, COP15 delivered the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. With COP17 starting in Yerevan, we are now halfway to the deadline, and according to the first Global Review of progress, countries are not on track to meet the biodiversity targets, and implementation must accelerate fast.
One of the main findings of the Global Review is that funding falls far short of the scale needed to halt and reverse nature loss. But the crisis facing the world’s biodiversity is not an absolute scarcity of capital – it is a profound public policy distortion.
The global economy currently spends roughly $30 destroying nature for every single dollar invested in its protection. According to a report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a staggering $2.4 trillion is spent in public subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture and water use, while global investment in biodiversity conservation and restoration stands at a mere $220 billion.
Countries urged to ramp up “insufficient” nature policies at COP17
Yet, discussions about how to close the biodiversity finance gap continue to claim that salvation lies in mobilising private capital, scaling offsets and “derisking” investments in nature. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of ecological stewardship and of the global financial architecture.
Biodiversity conservation is not a speculative investment portfolio – it is the foundation of human survival. The health of our planet is a non-monetisable, non-excludable public good. Expecting profit-seeking private capital to protect nature perpetuates the structural drivers of ecosystem destruction in the first place.
But if private market mechanisms cannot save biodiversity, where will the necessary public resources come from?
Money going to the wrong places
The answer lies in recovering the vast public wealth currently drained by cross-border tax abuse, financial secrecy and corporate impunity. Finance and environment ministers meeting in Yerevan must give a strong political signal that, to avert ecological breakdown, countries need to take swift action to reform global tax rules, eliminate harmful public subsidies and cancel unsustainable sovereign debts for the public revenues to end up where they belong.
Extractive sectors such as industrial agriculture, fishing, timber and mining continue business-as-usual, often heavily subsidised by public treasuries, while voluntary carbon and biodiversity offset markets pose a serious risk to nature conservation. Offset schemes have delivered only a negligible fraction of the funding needed to preserve ecosystems, allowing industries to continue with their destructive business-as-usual practices.
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