Abstract
Climate change is likely to profoundly modulate the burden of infectious diseases. However, attributing health impacts to a changing climate requires being able to associate changes in infectious disease incidence with the potentially complex influences of climate. This aim is further complicated by nonlinear feedbacks inherent in the dynamics of many infections, driven by the processes of immunity and transmission. Here, we detail the mechanisms by which climate drivers can shape infectious disease incidence, from direct effects on vector life history to indirect effects on human susceptibility, and detail the scope of variation available with which to probe these mechanisms. We review approaches used to evaluate and quantify associations between climate and infectious disease incidence, discuss the array of data available to tackle this question, and detail remaining challenges in understanding the implications of climate change for infectious disease incidence. We point to areas where synthesis between approaches used in climate science and infectious disease biology provide potential for progress.
Highlights
The role of environmental variables and climatic conditions in shaping human health has been recognized for centuries
Inference into the consequences of climate change requires building on core biological knowledge, leveraging spatial variation and range limits associated with climatic conditions [8], or building mechanistic understanding from shorter time-series of climatic variables and disease incidence—a process which itself often builds on biological knowledge and/or spatial variation
We review the mechanisms by which climatic variables might affect infectious disease transmission, discuss challenges involved in linking climate drivers to infectious disease transmission, provide an overview of statistical and mechanistic models that can be used to quantify these connections, and discuss how these might contribute to generating future projections of the effects of climate on health
Summary
The role of environmental variables and climatic conditions in shaping human health has been recognized for centuries. Inference into the consequences of climate change requires building on core biological knowledge (e.g. experiments indicating vector or pathogen survival across the range of a specific climatic variable [7]), leveraging spatial variation and range limits associated with climatic conditions [8], or building mechanistic understanding from shorter time-series of climatic variables and disease incidence—a process which itself often builds on biological knowledge and/or spatial variation Another issue is that while climate acts as an extrinsic driver, infectious disease dynamics have intrinsic drivers, fluctuations in population-level immunity and susceptibility, as well as the dynamics of human behaviour (e.g. increasing population size and mobility can modify previous geographical limits for vector-borne infections [9]). Our focus is on infectious diseases in humans, and we draw from examples across a range of pathogens to concretely illustrate the methodological challenges and approaches that have been developed to grapple with projecting future infectious disease incidence under climate change
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