Ticks and Mosquitoes, Infectious Disease Carriers, Are Expanding Their Range

As the global pandemic of the novel coronavirus continues on—with cases on the rise in some countries and US states—the world also just experienced the hottest month of May ever recorded, and atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide reached unmatched heights at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has been monitoring gases in the atmosphere since the 1950s.

But is there a relationship between the coronavirus pandemic and the increasing signs of climate change being detected?

SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, is believed to have spilled over from wildlife to humans—bats being the probable culprit. Besides the fact that both climate change and COVID-19 pose serious health risks, scientists have pointed out that some of the root causes of climate change also increase the risk of pandemics—such as rapid deforestation and urbanization, which can promote close contact between wildlife and people and increase the chances for viruses to cross over to humans. The origins of COVID-19 have prompted bold calls to reexamine how people and communities are encroaching on wilderness areas and how to prepare for the spread of diseases in a world increasingly altered by climate change, which exacerbates the problem as different species—their territories shifting with the climate—intermingle in new ways.

“The pandemic has given me a new sense of urgency around big problems that take time to solve, and climate change is certainly a huge problem,” says Gregory Wellenius, a Boston University School of Public Health professor of environmental health, who joined BU in January to establish a program dedicated to studying the impacts of climate change on human health. When it comes to parsing out the ways climate change affects human lives, according to Wellenius, often what first comes to mind are catastrophic natural events—wildfires, hurricanes, searing heat waves—which can lead to immediate injuries and traumatic losses of human life.