Challenges to Mitigating the Urban Health Burden of Mosquito-Borne Diseases in the Face of Climate Change

Antonio Ligsay, Olivier Telle and Richard Paul
Additional contact information
Antonio Ligsay: The Graduate School, University of Santo Tomas, Manila 1008, Philippines
Olivier Telle: CNRS, Géographie-Cités, Paris 1 Université Paris-Sorbonne, 75006 Paris, France
Richard Paul: Functional Genetics of Infectious Diseases Unit, Institut Pasteur, UMR 2000 (CNRS), 75015 Paris, France

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 9, 1-12

Abstract: Cities worldwide are facing ever-increasing pressure to develop mitigation strategies for all sectors to deal with the impacts of climate change. Cities are expected to house 70% of the world’s population by 2050, and developing related resilient health systems is a significant challenge. Because of their physical nature, cities’ surface temperatures are often substantially higher than that of the surrounding rural areas, generating the so-called Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Whilst considerable emphasis has been placed on strategies to mitigate against the UHI-associated negative health effects of heat and pollution in cities, mosquito-borne diseases have largely been ignored. However, the World Health Organization estimates that one of the main consequences of global warming will be an increased burden of mosquito-borne diseases, many of which have an urban facet to their epidemiology and thus the global population exposed to these pathogens will steadily increase. Current health mitigation strategies for heat and pollution, for example, may, however, be detrimental for mosquito-borne diseases. Implementation of multi-sectoral strategies that can benefit many sectors (such as water, labor, and health) do exist or can be envisaged and would enable optimal use of the meagre resources available. Discussion among multi-sectoral stakeholders should be actively encouraged.

Keywords: climate change; urban heat islands; mosquito-borne disease; mitigation strategies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/9/5035/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/9/5035/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:9:p:5035-:d:551500

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().