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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Outbreaks of mosquito-borne illnesses like yellow fever, dengue, Zika and chikungunya are rising around the world. Climate change has created conditions favorable to mosquitoes' spread, but so have human travel and migration and accelerating urbanization, creating new mini-habitats for mosquitoes.

In today's Nature Microbiology, a large group of international collaborators combined these factors into prediction models that offer insight into the recent spread of two key disease-spreading mosquitoes -- Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. The models forecast that by 2050, 49 percent of the world's population will live in places where these species are established if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current rates.

"We find evidence that if no action is taken to reduce the current rate at which the climate is warming, pockets of habitat will open up across many urban areas with vast amounts of individuals susceptible to infection," says Moritz Kraemer, PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital and the University of Oxford (UK).

[...] In the next 5 to 15 years, the models predict that spread of both species will be driven by human movement, rather than environmental changes. But thereafter, expansion will be driven by changes in climate, temperature and urbanization that create new mosquito habitats. And if climate change isn't curbed by 2050, the spread is predicted to be even greater.

"With this new work, we can start to anticipate how the transmission of diseases like dengue and Zika might be influenced by a variety of environmental changes," says Simon I. Hay, director of Geospatial Science at IHME and Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington. "Incorporating this information into future scenarios of risk can help policymakers predict health impacts and help guide strategies to limit the spread of these mosquito species, an essential step to reduce the disease burden."

Moritz U. G. Kraemer, et. al. Past and future spread of the arbovirus vectors Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Nature Microbiology, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41564-019-0376-y

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