It’s been more than two decades since scientists first reported that a warming climate was responsible for malaria epidemics in the mountains of Kenya and Ethiopia, making it one of the first diseases linked to climate change. But after years of debate, it has remained unclear whether climate change is indeed making malaria worse.
In a new study, Yale researchers are getting closer to an answer. They concluded that climate change has probably increased the burden of childhood malaria in parts of <a href="https://absafricatv9491.live-website.com/europe-africa-fuel-availability-outlook-29-july/” title=”Europe & Africa Fuel Availability Outlook 29 July”>Africa. But ongoing efforts to eradicate malaria have overwhelmingly countered the overall impact — by roughly a 200-fold margin.
“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will save the lives of children in cooler parts of Africa, and malaria eradication will protect everyone — and is still definitely possible in a warmer world,” said Colin Carlson, assistant professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) at the Yale School of Public Health and corresponding author of the new study.
Is malaria linked with climate change?
Malaria was one of the first diseases linked to climate change. The debate about climate change and malaria goes back decades, but scientists have found further evidence that climate change is redistributing malaria risk across Africa.
How is climate change affecting malaria?
Yale researchers have concluded that climate change has probably increased the burden of childhood malaria in parts of Africa. But so far, malaria eradication has been countering the overall impact, by roughly a 200-fold margin.
What is impact attribution?
Impact attribution is a toolkit that measures impacts of climate change on things like human health by simulating alternate worlds without climate change and comparing them to the world we live in.
The study appears in the journal Nature.
The researchers launched their investigation back in 2019. At the time, it was the early days of a new method called “impact attribution,” a toolkit that measures impacts of climate change on matters such as human health by simulating alternate worlds without climate change and comparing them to the world we live in. This way, the thinking was, researchers could be more certain that changes they were seeing were not just caused by temperature but specifically by human influence on the temperature. For something as complicated as malaria, which is much more influenced by factors such as poverty and health care than climate, they needed those methods to get a definitive answer.
For the new study, the researchers started with a massive dataset on childhood malaria going all the way back to the turn of the 20th century. They used the data to do three things. First, they built a statistical model that measures how temperature, floods, and droughts affect malaria prevalence in children. Then, they used that information to estimate how climate change impacted malaria during the 20th century. Finally, they predicted what climate change could do over the rest of the 21st century under different scenarios, including more or less progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Assisting eradication
Through this process, the researchers concluded that rising temperatures have probably caused a slight increase in malaria across Africa. During the last decade, they calculated, there was about one extra case of malaria for every thousand children on the continent, although they concede there’s significant uncertainty with that number given the variation across the continent in terms of temperature. Mosquitoes are cold-blooded insects, so malaria is strongly controlled by temperature, with a peak in transmission around 25 degrees Celsius.
When the researchers broke things down to local levels, however, the picture became much clearer: climate change has been increasing malaria in colder places (East and Southern Africa) and reducing malaria in hotter places (West Africa). That trend, they say, will roughly continue for at least a few more decades: malaria will continue to expand into colder parts of the continent, but in the warmer areas where most malaria cases happen today, climate change might slightly speed up the eradication of the disease.
“For East and Southern Africa, there’s still a risk of malaria showing up more in cooler places, and we can probably prevent around five cases per 1,000 children in each region by meeting the Paris Agreement target [which would hold the global temperature increase below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels],” Carlson said. “This project was a huge step forward for how we understand the true cost of climate change.”
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