UC San Diego

Understanding the costs that climate change will exact on society is crucial to devising an appropriate policy response. One of the channels through while climate change will affect human society is through vector-borne diseases whose epidemiology is conditioned by ambient ecology. This paper introduces the literature on malaria, its cost on society, and the consequences of climate change to the physics community in hopes of inspiring synergistic research in the area of climate change and health. It then demonstrates the use of one ecological indicator of malaria suitability to provide an order-of-magnitude assessment of how climate change might affect the malaria burden. The average of Global Circulation Model end-of-century predictions implies a 47% average increase in the basic reproduction number of the disease in today’s malarious areas, significantly complicating malaria elimination efforts.