Ahead of the Paris Olympic Games this summer, the organising committee was concerned about two principal diseases: Covid, which Europe is fully familiar with, and dengue fever.
Dengue, a climate-sensitive infectious disease spread by mosquitoes, is traditionally considered a “tropical” infectious disease.
But authorities closely monitored and prepared for dengue in Paris due to its potential to spread in the increasingly warm climate of the region.
A great deal of progress has been made over recent decades in the fight against some infectious diseases, such as malaria, yet this progress is at risk due to climate change.
Mosquitoes carrying the dengue virus are now a threat in France and other European countries because of warmer summers.
Extreme weather events and warming temperatures are giving many infectious diseases opportunities to expand to new regions, putting billions of people at risk.
Climate-sensitive infectious diseases
Any infectious disease whose transmission and spread are influenced by changes and variations in climate and weather is considered a climate-sensitive infectious disease (CSID).
These include diseases that are spread by air, food, water or vectors.
The CSIDs that have received most media attention are vector-borne. They are caused by pathogens that have been transmitted to a human by a vector, such as a snail, fly, tick or mosquito.
Vector-borne diseases include dengue, Zika virus, malaria, Chikungunya and yellow fever.
Ideal breeding conditions
Almost all vector-borne diseases have a climate dimension. Both pathogens – the microorganisms that cause the disease itself – and vectors are very sensitive and highly responsive to the environments they live in. Changes in temperature and rainfall can have significant impacts on their spread.
In 2024, global temperatures reached record highs. These extreme conditions have been linked to a surge in dengue fever cases worldwide and contributed to the spread of other infectious diseases.
Pathogens and vectors typically thrive in warmer climates – in part because there is a longer season in which the vectors can live, breed and pass on the disease.
Higher temperatures change the behaviour of insect vectors. Adult mosquitoes reproduce more quickly and bite more frequently in warmer weather.
Pathogens also multiply faster within the vector in warmer conditions. This means there is a higher concentration of the disease-causing pathogen transmitted within insect bites, increasing the chance of infection. In turn, this leads to quicker and more intense disease outbreaks.
Temperature is only one part of the picture. Changes in rainfall patterns contribute to creating ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes and other vectors too.
Pakistan, for example, has had increasingly heavy monsoon seasons – linked to climate change – that result in severe flooding. When the floods recede, stagnant water pools are left creating ideal breeding sites for some mosquitos.
Flooding in 2024 has seen 1.3m cases of malaria recorded in Pakistan so far, with cases likely to continue rising. In 2021, there were 500,000 cases recorded in total.
Unequal risks
Vulnerable populations are typically at greater risk from CSIDs – including children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.
Additionally, communities with limited healthcare, inadequate housing and poor sanitation are more susceptible to outbreaks of CSIDs due to reduced capability to prevent, detect and treat infections.
Currently, lower-income countries – particularly those in tropical regions – bear the higher burden of CSIDs. Tropical regions are more exposed to vector-borne diseases for several reasons – from the warm and humid climate and the existence of disease-carrying insects to inadequate housing, infrastructure and healthcare.
This combination of factors leads to heightened risk and less resilience against the spread of such infectious diseases in many tropical countries.
However, as temperatures rise, cooler regions, such as Europe, are also becoming more vulnerable to climate-sensitive diseases.
Warmer temperatures increase the geographic range where vectors – such as mosquitoes and ticks – can survive and breed.
This pattern is exemplified by Lyme disease, an illness transmitted by ticks. Increasingly prevalent throughout the UK, it is also steadily moving into northern areas of Canada and even the Arctic – where it was previously absent as ticks could not survive the cold temperatures.
Due to climate and land-use change, ticks can now spread Lyme disease into these new areas and could lead to year-round tick seasons, which could be expected in areas of Scotland and elsewhere.
Reducing risks
While curbing the spread of CSIDs requires global action to slow climate change, there are adaptation measures that can be put in place now.
These measures are particularly important in lower-income countries, where the impacts of climate change on health are most acutely felt.
Wellcome is funding 24 research teams from both climate and health backgrounds in 12 countries to develop new digital tools to respond to the emerging threat of CSIDs.
Integrating climate data with health information can improve the prediction and management of disease outbreaks to, for example, create better early warning systems.
For example, a research team based in Vietnam is developing a new digital tool called E-DENGUE to predict dengue outbreaks as early as two months in advance. It will be tailored for the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam.
This will allow public health practitioners to be one step ahead of dengue outbreaks, giving them time to mobilise resources and concentrate interventions to the most affected areas.
Reducing the ability of mosquitoes to transmit viruses is another promising approach being used to regain control of CSIDs.
The World Mosquito Program is releasing mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia, an extremely common bacterium that occurs naturally in 50% of insect species. This bacterium was found to reduce the ability of tiger mosquitoes to transmit viruses such as dengue and Zika.
However, extreme heat can reduce the effectiveness of this method, highlighting the need for heat-resistant strains of the Wolbachia bacterium in future control programmes.
Recent advances in vaccine development also offer hope. A vaccine for dengue fever has been approved in several countries and more effective vaccines are under development.
For malaria, the vaccine Mosquirix has been recommended by the World Health Organization for use in moderate- and high-transmission areas, and a second-generation malaria vaccine, known as R21/Matrix-M, has demonstrated high efficacy in trials. This summer, Ivory Coast became the first country to roll out R21/Matrix-M.
These vaccines represent strides forward in preventing these diseases and complement other control measures.
Addressing the most acute problems
Climate change is reshaping the global landscape of infectious diseases, with vector-borne diseases at the forefront of this shift.
As temperatures rise and extreme weather becomes more severe, the risk of disease outbreaks increases – both for regions where a disease is already endemic and for those that are experiencing it anew.
Countries that have made the smallest contribution to greenhouse gas emissions are often the ones most affected by climate change’s health impacts and the least well equipped to deal with them.
Ensuring that these countries have access to tools and resources and the support needed to strengthen their health systems will help stem the spread of CSIDs. But much more will be needed to ensure that they can adapt to and mitigate the wider health effects of climate change.
The post Guest post: The growing threat of climate-sensitive infectious diseases appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: The growing threat of climate-sensitive infectious diseases
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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