Letters | Climate change and coronaviruses: a warming world encourages the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases
- Rising global temperatures will shorten winter seasons, which benefit potential disease-carrying agents and enable them to spread further north
- Climate change may also make habitats unsuitable for animals, forcing them closer to urban areas and increasing the risk of transmission of zoonotic diseases
While the relationship between the new coronavirus and climate change is tenuous at best, a warming climate will exacerbate the emergence of other novel infectious diseases in the future.
Milder and shorter winters also benefit potential disease-carrying agents, such as mosquitoes and rats, as they can stay active and breed for longer and earlier in the season. Warmer climates also allow them to travel further up north and to higher altitudes, bypassing borders and bringing diseases to new places.
This is a particular problem as nature is a reservoir of potential human diseases: 60 per cent of all recognised human diseases and 75 per cent of emerging infectious diseases in the last few decades were zoonoses or transmitted from animals to humans.
Wild animal link to virus outbreak should change health strategy
So long as people live close together and global travel is easy, disease outbreaks are unavoidable. The emergence and re-emergence of infectious disease is, however, just one of the many health risks that climate change will bring about.
Wendell Chan, programme officer, Friends of the Earth (HK)