More than half of the human diseases caused by pathogens have been worsened at some point by the sort of impacts associated with the climate crisis, a new and exhaustive study of the link between disease and climatic hazards has found.
Diseases such as Zika, malaria, dengue, chikungunya and even Covid-19 have been aggravated by climate impacts such as heatwaves, wildfires, extreme rainfall and floods, the paper found. In all, there are more than 1,000 different pathways for these various impacts to worsen the spread of disease, a cavalcade of threats “too numerous for comprehensive societal adaptations”, the researchers wrote.
