Impacts of climate change on global health: a scoping review on the case of malaria

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change is having a potential impact on human health, being one of the main environmental and health challenges of our time. Malaria, the major killer of children worldwide, is critically the most climate sensitive vector-borne disease in the world. However, the link between climate change and malaria is still a subject of discussion within the scientific community and a question that remains unresolved. This scoping review aims to elucidate this relation through evidence collected from time series analyses, geographical comparison and outbreak studies performed in different endemic countries of malaria. Our results reveal that climatic variables (temperature, rainfall and humidity) are the prime determinants of geographical distribution, seasonality and incidence trends of malaria. Historical records in temperature rise and precipitation trends on account of anthropogenic global warming are clearly propitiating the occurrence of local malaria outbreaks, and the anomalous geographical shift of the vector and parasite towards regions where populations are immunologically unprepared. Furthermore, this review introduces computational models as a tool to predict forthcoming malaria scenarios driven by climate change, and discusses the possible implications for Western and low-income countries in the near future.