Malaria is the deadliest climate-sensitive infectious disease.
Malaria is the deadliest climate-sensitive infectious disease. Yet, researchers and public health officials have long argued over how climate change has shaped its spread. A new Nature study resolves this debate, providing the most comprehensive assessment to date. The study quantifies climate change’s historical and future impact on sub-Saharan Africa’s children, where most cases and deaths occur. It finds that climate change has slightly increased malaria overall. Looking ahead, rising temperatures could increase the malaria risk in southern and East Africa while reducing it where it is most rampant today, as it becomes so hot that even mosquitoes struggle to survive.
“Climate change isn't just making malaria worse or better—it’s moving it,” says co-author Tamma Carleton, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics and faculty head of research for the Climate Impact Lab. “Whether a place sees elevated malaria risks or reduced burdens under climate change depends on how hot it is today. We see relief in the current hotspots and new risk nearly everywhere else.”
The study finds that climate change has slightly suppressed the spread of the disease in the warm, malaria hotbeds of today, and will continue to as it gets too hot for the disease to flourish—posing other human health threats. This is especially the case in many large West African nations (Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali), where climate change will reduce cases by 5 percent. In extremely hot Sahelian countries (Niger, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia), the disease may actually be fully eliminated.
Read More: University of California, Berkeley
