Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2021 Apr 17;20(1):190.
doi: 10.1186/s12936-021-03718-x.

Climate-proofing a malaria eradication strategy

Hannah Nissan  1   2 , Israel Ukawuba  3 , Madeleine Thomson  4
Affiliations
Review

Climate-proofing a malaria eradication strategy

Hannah Nissan et al. Malar J. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Two recent initiatives, the World Health Organization (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group on Malaria Eradication and the Lancet Commission on Malaria Eradication, have assessed the feasibility of achieving global malaria eradication and proposed strategies to achieve it. Both reports rely on a climate-driven model of malaria transmission to conclude that long-term trends in climate will assist eradication efforts overall and, consequently, neither prioritize strategies to manage the effects of climate variability and change on malaria programming. This review discusses the pathways via which climate affects malaria and reviews the suitability of climate-driven models of malaria transmission to inform long-term strategies such as an eradication programme. Climate can influence malaria directly, through transmission dynamics, or indirectly, through myriad pathways including the many socioeconomic factors that underpin malaria risk. These indirect effects are largely unpredictable and so are not included in climate-driven disease models. Such models have been effective at predicting transmission from weeks to months ahead. However, due to several well-documented limitations, climate projections cannot accurately predict the medium- or long-term effects of climate change on malaria, especially on local scales. Long-term climate trends are shifting disease patterns, but climate shocks (extreme weather and climate events) and variability from sub-seasonal to decadal timeframes have a much greater influence than trends and are also more easily integrated into control programmes. In light of these conclusions, a pragmatic approach is proposed to assessing and managing the effects of climate variability and change on long-term malaria risk and on programmes to control, eliminate and ultimately eradicate the disease. A range of practical measures are proposed to climate-proof a malaria eradication strategy, which can be implemented today and will ensure that climate variability and change do not derail progress towards eradication.

Keywords: Climate change; Climate variability; Disease modelling; Disease programming; Malaria eradication; Monitoring and evaluation; Policy.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no actual or potential competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Direct and indirect interactions between climate and health. Conventional disease models consider only the direct effects of climate variability and change on health outcomes (A), but the climate also affects health outcomes indirectly, through its influence on the many socioeconomic factors that combine to determine health risks through a two-way process (as population health also influences socioeconomic outcomes) (B and C). The climate cannot be considered an exogenous part of this system: socioeconomic factors are driving climate change through greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions and land-surface changes (D) ( adapted from Thomson and Mason [82]; available from https://cipha.iri.columbia.edu/CIPHABOOK2019/Supplementary_Materials/)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Timescales of variability for global average annual precipitation (a, mm) and temperature (b, °C) anomalies. Raw annual averages are shown in black, fitted decadal cycles in green and the long-term trend in red. In (a), the horizonal blue lines show the 10-year average precipitation anomalies from 1900–1910 and 1980–1990 (see text). The portion of total variance (%) in precipitation (c) and temperature (d) explained by the long-term trend is shown spatially in the bottom two panels. See Greene et al. [83] or http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/Global/Time_Scales/index.html for the methodology and data
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Changes in the elevation threshold for malaria over time in the Ethiopian Highlands. Solid lines: mean elevation above mean sea level (m) where the 10-day average minimum temperature in a year never exceeds 18 °C (red) and 15 °C (blue). Dashed lines indicate the uncertainty in mean elevation. Coloured bars show anomalous values (°C) of the October–December “Niño 3.4” sea surface temperature index in the Pacific Ocean. Trend lines and associated slopes are also shown [42]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. WHO Strategic Advisory Group on Malaria Eradication. Malaria eradication: benefits, future scenarios and feasibility. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2019. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-CDS-GMP-2019.10. Accessed 29 Mar 2021.
    1. Feachem RGA, Chen I, Akbari O, Bertozzi-Villa A, Bhatt S, Binka F, et al. Malaria eradication within a generation: ambitious, achievable, and necessary. Lancet. 2019;394:1056–1112. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)31139-0. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Martens P, Kovats RS, Nijhof S, De Vries P, Livermore MTJ, Bradley DJ, et al. Climate change and future populations at risk of malaria. Glob Environ Chang. 1999;9:89–107. doi: 10.1016/S0959-3780(99)00020-5. - DOI
    1. Reiter P. Climate change and mosquito-borne disease: knowing the horse before hitching the cart. Rev Sci Tech Int Des Epizoot. 2008;27:383–398. doi: 10.20506/rst.27.2.1804. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Alonso D, Bouma MJ, Pascual M. Epidemic malaria and warmer temperatures in recent decades in an East African highland. Proc Biol Sci. 2011;278:1661–1669. - PMC - PubMed