Title:Exploring the link between climate change and pandemics

As the Earth’s climate continues to warm, researchers predict wild animals will be forced to relocate their habitats—likely to regions with large human populations—dramatically increasing the risk of a viral jump to humans that could lead to the next pandemic.

In the April 2022 issue of Nature magazine, this link between climate change and viral transmission is described by an international research team led by scientists at Georgetown University.

In their study, the scientists conducted the first comprehensive assessment of how climate change will restructure the global mammalian virome. The work focuses on geographic range shifts, the journeys that species will undertake as they follow their habitats into new areas. As mammals encounter other mammals for the first time, the study projects they will share thousands of viruses.

The scientists say these shifts bring greater opportunities for viruses like Ebola or coronaviruses to emerge in new areas, making them harder to track, and into new types of animals, making it easier for viruses to jump across a “stepping stone” species into humans.

“It’s unclear exactly how these new viruses might affect the species involved, but it’s likely that many of them will translate to new conservation risks and fuel the emergence of novel outbreaks in humans,” says the study’s co-lead author, Gregory Albery, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at Georgetown College.

The study suggests that climate change will become the biggest upstream risk factor for disease emergence, exceeding higher-profile issues like deforestation, wildlife trade, and industrial agriculture. The authors say the solution is to pair wildlife disease surveillance with real-time studies of environmental change.

“When a Brazilian free-tailed bat makes it all the way to Appalachia, we should be invested in knowing what viruses are tagging along,” says the study’s lead author Colin Carlson, PhD, an assistant research professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center. “Trying to spot these host jumps in real-time is the only way we’ll be able to prevent this process from leading to more spillovers and more pandemics.”