The global spread of malaria in a future, warmer world

Abstract

The frequent warnings that global climate change will allow falciparum malaria to spread into northern latitudes, including Europe and large parts of the United States, are based on biological transmission models driven principally by temperature. These models were assessed for their value in predicting present, and therefore future, malaria distribution. In an alternative statistical approach, the recorded present-day global distribution of falciparum malaria was used to establish the current multivariate climatic constraints. These results were applied to future climate scenarios to predict future distributions, which showed remarkably few changes, even under the most extreme scenarios.