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According to the World Health Organization, climate change is the greatest threat to public health in the 21st century. This issue took center stage at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) Global 2025, held in Vienna, Austria, from April 11-15.

Rachel Lowe, PhD, researcher and professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and Global Health Resilience Group Leader at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain, and Kimberly Fornace, PhD, epidemiologist and associate professor from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore, Singapore, presented pioneering initiatives from their research groups. These initiatives focus on climate surveillance and integrating data into tools that serve in global public health decision-making, improving preparedness and response to outbreaks and emergencies of diseases sensitive to climate change impacts.

Lowe noted during her talk that half of the world’s population is currently at risk of contracting a mosquito-borne disease, a direct consequence of climate change, particularly the rising temperatures. She leads two major projects, HARMONIZE and IDExtremes, which aim to provide robust data and modeling tools to build local resilience against the threat of emerging infectious diseases in climate-change hotspots.

As part of the Harmonize project, her team recently published a data harmonization process framework and a library for R and Python statistical programs. These tools offer advanced statistical methods, data visualization, and predictive modeling to address complex challenges in this field. Additionally, she coordinates the European IDAlert project, which aims to address the emergence of zoonotic diseases by developing novel indicators and early warning systems.

All these tools can shape public health strategies in several ways, such as by creating compensation funds for those affected by damage and losses in the context of climate-related natural disasters, establishing preparedness and response systems for such disasters, and evaluating interventions. Together, these measures will support adaptation to the new climatic conditions.

Mapping Risk Areas

Lowe highlighted several areas of action, including the identification of new regions in Europe where malaria transmission could re-emerge due to the return of mosquito vectors. Similarly, for dengue, the risk zones have expanded to traditionally colder regions, such as northern Vietnam. Surprisingly, an increased risk for dengue has been observed following droughts, contradicting the classically accepted notion that associates outbreaks with wetter periods. This finding has been attributed to the storage of water in homes in response to droughts.

Temperature monitoring in sensitive regions has revealed that the cause of the emergence of the vector that transmits dengue is drought followed by warm and wet periods. Conversely, a drought followed by a cool period and another drought represents a low-risk climate condition for dengue outbreaks.

Using these data, risk maps are created to assign alert levels to regions and plan corresponding actions in each region, such as routine measures, epidemic preparedness, or active alerts. This approach has been implemented in collaboration with the Brazilian government, where unprecedented levels of dengue fever in 2024 posed significant challenges to public health.

In Europe, the EpiOutlook platform has been proposed as a framework for assessing the risk of transmission and/or emergence of various infectious diseases in relation to their corresponding pathogens and transmission vectors, including malaria, leishmaniasis, diseases transmitted by the tick genera Ixodes and Hyalomma, vibriosis other than cholera, West Nile virus, and arboviruses such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya.

Impact of Climate on Vectors

Fornace elaborated on how variations in temperature and rainfall affect mosquitoes as disease vectors while also affecting other aspects of human activity, such as agriculture and infrastructure. She explained that temperature improves mosquito survival up to an optimal point, beyond which a further increase begins to decrease their population. Similarly, their tolerance for increased rainfall is higher; however, excessive torrential rains can hinder larval development and reservoir formation.

Another anthropogenic factor discussed is global deforestation. Changes in land use, such as increased farming or plantation, also affect how animals forage for food and how close they are to people, which, in turn, affects their relationship with humans and the potential for disease transmission.

Monitoring Tools

How are these changes monitored and linked to disease transmission cycles? Primarily through satellite data, which has exponentially improved in quantity and quality in recent years. Drones and satellites are key tools in this process. Drones offer great adaptability and high-resolution images but are limited in coverage, whereas satellites provide images of the entire Earth’s surface but at a much lower resolution and frequency, such that sometimes weeks pass between one image acquisition and the next.

This information is integrated into predictive models to assess the impact of changes in the Earth’s surface on infectious diseases. Artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT are being integrated to enhance these models, particularly in the identification of specific elements, such as water bodies or human settlements, within images.

Both researchers concluded that the ultimate goal is not merely to understand risk but to design surveillance tools that allow public health policies to shift from reactive responses to predictive prevention.

This story was translated from Univadis Spain using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.