Saturday, October 03, 2026

Itching for a solution: Addressing mosquito-borne disease as climate change bites

Monash University

Prevention measures, including vector control, vaccine deployment and cutting greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming are critical to counter the growing burden of mosquito-borne diseases in a changing climate, according to a new paper by Monash University researchers.

The review, published today in Science Advances, examines the complex ecological, epidemiological and socioeconomic factors that influence the transmission of malaria and dengue.

Malaria is a serious, life-threatening disease caused by a parasite that is typically spread to humans through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.

Dengue is caused by a virus that is transmitted to humans through the bites of infected female Aedes mosquitoes.

Across the world, there are close to 300 million cases of malaria and almost 400 million dengue infections every year.

Lead researcher Dr Toby Cumming, a research fellow in the Health and Climate Initiative at the Monash School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, said properly understanding the drivers of disease transmission is key to identifying effective public health responses.

“As climate change increases temperatures and alters rainfall patterns, this expands the areas with climatic conditions in which Anopheles and Aedes mosquito populations can thrive,” Dr Cumming said.

While the influence of these climate factors is complicated – relationships are non-linear, effects are seasonal, there is substantial local variability – they have broadly similar impacts on malaria and dengue transmission.

“Yet over the last century, during a time of unambiguous warming, rates of malaria have declined while rates of dengue have risen,” Dr Cumming said.

The researchers highlight non-climate factors that help explain the different trajectories of the two diseases.

Mosquito control interventions and drug therapies have driven major gains in reducing malaria transmission, while increasing urbanisation has favoured Aedes mosquitoes and hence the spread of dengue, for which no therapeutics are available.

Dr Cumming emphasised that there is no room for complacency: although malaria is in long-term decline, global incidence has risen 8.5 per cent over the past decade.

“Recent malaria trends and the rapid growth in dengue are both serious concerns, and we must escalate our prevention and control efforts,” he said.

Novel preventive interventions for dengue are emerging that include vaccines and innovative vector control strategies, such as the introduction of the bacterium Wolbachia into Aedes mosquito populations, which reduces the mosquitoes’ ability to transmit dengue, developed by the World Mosquito Program, a not-for-profit group of companies owned by Monash University.

“Ultimately, our research reinforces the need for a coordinated approach, encompassing interventions to address the many climate and non-climate factors that contribute to the spread of mosquito-borne disease,” Dr Cumming said.

Read the research paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aei0953

Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aei0953

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

How climate change affects mosquito-borne infectious disease: The different trajectories of malaria and dengue

Article Publication Date

2-Oct-2026

COI Statement

K.L. is an Associate Editor for Science Advances. The other authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Culture versus climate: how global heating endangers UNESCO heritage sites

UNESCO World Heritage sites in France and around the world are under threat from the climate crisis. From ancient cities to medieval abbeys, floods, droughts, rising seas and wildfires are putting humanity’s most precious cultural heritage at risk.

Issued on: 03/10/2026 - RFI

Mont Saint-Michel and its surrounding bay were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. © Reuters - Pascal Rossignol

A recent study published by France's EDHEC Climate Institute lists the 10 sites in the country most endangered by extreme weather that is being exacerbated by climate change.

At the top of the list is the 12th-century Fontenay Abbey in Burgundy. The abbey was built near a stream, which was useful when there was no indoor plumbing. But 800 years on, it’s a different story.

"This [abbey] was built at the bottom of a small valley, near a stream. But that is precisely what makes it the most vulnerable site," Anthony Schrapffer, scientific director of EDHEC, told RFI.

"Being located beside a stream, which was an advantage in medieval times, has become a factor contributing to the site’s vulnerability due to the intensification of the water cycle and the increased risk of flooding."

The study identified flooding as the main threat to France’s cultural heritage. One in three Unesco-listed sites in France will be endangered by floods by 2050 – including Avignon, the City of the Popes on the banks of the Rhône, and Mont Saint-Michel.

"With a storm, we have a surge that floods the coastline. It’s an event that is exacerbated by rising sea levels. Mont-Saint-Michel is a cultural site that is, in fact, already exposed to the ocean, storms and so on. But with rising sea levels, there is a risk of damage to this site," said Schrapffer.

The threat is more acute when sites are exposed to a combination of climate-related hazards, such as the Pont du Gard, the famous Roman aqueduct in the south of France – which faces flooding, heatwaves and wildfires.

UNESCO warns majority of World Heritage sites at risk from drought or flooding

Global threat

It is not only in France that UNESCO World Heritage sites are under threat. Another study, carried out two years ago by Climate X, a UK-based climate risk data and analytics platform, identified the 50 most endangered UNESCO sites.

Topping the list is the 9th-century Subak irrigation system for Bali's terraced rice fields.

China's Quanzhou, the global maritime trade hub and starting point of the Maritime Silk Road, is also under threat.

On the African continent, Timbuktu is endangered by the encroaching desert and sandstorms.

Further south in Mali, Djenné's 2,000 mud-brick houses are cracking under the strain of drought and high-quality clay for their upkeep is becoming increasingly scarce.

"We have realised that cultural heritage is one of the areas that can be affected [by climate change] and is not given sufficient attention," said Schrapffer.

"A road can be rebuilt if it is damaged, but a 12th-century abbey cannot be replaced. If we do not demonstrate that cultural heritage can be affected, we will be unable to take action. We will simply be witnesses to the extreme events in the future that will affect these sites."

This article has been adapted from the original version in French by Florent Guignard.

Underwater umbrellas for coral reefs could help protect against heat damage, study finds

Temporary shades placed over especially vulnerable Caribbean corals mitigate and even partly reverse bleaching driven by marine heatwaves

Frontiers

image:
A shaded coral photographed by Karen Neely.
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Credit: Karen Neely

High sea temperatures driven by the climate crisis damage corals, bleaching them ghostly white and killing them. While restoration of dead reefs is possible, it’s difficult and expensive, and restored corals are vulnerable to future heatwaves. Finding ways to stop or slow the damage to existing reefs is crucial. Now scientists think they’ve found a way to protect some especially vulnerable Caribbean corals: umbrella-like shades. Shading can’t cool the water, but it prevents UV and irradiance damage, which makes heat damage to corals worse.

“Heat-related coral bleaching is probably the biggest threat to reefs worldwide, and we absolutely have to address climate change to have any hope of reefs as we know them existing in the future,” said Dr Karen Neely of Nova Southeastern University, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Marine Science. “Solutions like shading can offer temporary protection on small scales. The 2023 coral bleaching event in Florida essentially wiped out branching corals, and at some inshore sites had a devastating impact on brain corals. This study stemmed directly from that event: we wanted to provide proof of concept for tools to save targeted corals in similar future events.”

Safer in the shade?

In the summer of 2024, Neely and her team set up 20 custom-made shades over 10 different colonies of two species of brain coral, Pseudodiploria clivosa and Colpophyllia natans, at Newfound Harbor in the Florida Keys. They also selected 20 matching corals to act as controls.

The umbrella-like shades, made of pipes with nylon cloths attached, were temporarily fixed to the seabed with cord and floated 30cm over each shaded coral. They reduced light by 60%. Divers visited every two weeks to track color changes and take tissue biopsies from the corals, to monitor the algae living inside the corals’ tissues. Corals have a symbiotic relationship with these algae: the coral provides the algae with a home and the algae provides the coral with most of its nutritional needs. Algae also lend corals their color, so when corals turn white under heat stress, we know that the relationship has broken down and the coral is starving.

Although the heat stress measured at Newfound Harbor that summer was the second-highest on record, the shaded corals lost less color than expected — and the differences were greatest during the most intense periods of thermal stress. Shaded corals even recovered some of their color after the shades were installed.

However, Neely and her team also saw less bleaching than they expected overall, and no dead coral. This could have been because 2023’s record heatwave meant that most of the corals were occupied by an algae called Durusdinium, which is very heat-tolerant but is associated with lower coral growth and possibly greater susceptibility to disease.

“Shades reversed the observed bleaching, but the event wasn’t severe enough to cause mortality on control or shaded corals,” said Neely. “However, we know that even bleaching that doesn’t cause mortality can impact corals’ future disease susceptibility and reproductive capacity. It would be interesting to quantify if and to what extent shade structures benefitted these corals after their removal by tracking disease and reproductive output.”

Under the umbrella

There were no differences in density of algae occupation or algae species between the control and shaded groups. This could have been influenced by the sampling location: the team’s permits stipulated sampling from the corals’ edges, which are less exposed to the light and experience less bleaching. This means that even the samples from the controls received some shade.

Similar constraints also meant that the scientists couldn’t install the shades until well after the water temperature got high enough to bleach coral; if they’d been installed earlier, the shades might have been more effective. However, there was still a significant positive impact.

“Scaling is the big limitation of this study; shading is not a cure-all for coral reefs, and its use would require hard decisions about what corals are worth saving,” said Neely. “We found it was effective on two highly-susceptible coral species, so it is likely to be useful for most others, but additional studies would be needed to confirm that. It is also likely that thermal stress would reach a point at which no amount of shading could help a coral, but only future experimentation would be able to define the bounds of that.”

Karen Neely and Kathryn Toth work on a shade

Karen Neely (left) and Kathryn Toth (right) work on a shade.

Photograph by Arelys Chaparro.

Kathryn Toth and Arelys Chaparro at work on a coral shade

Kathryn Toth (left) and Arelys Chaparro (right) at work on a coral shade.

Photograph by Karen Neely