Abstract
West Nile virus (WNV) is an emerging mosquito-borne pathogen in Europe where it represents a new public health threat. While climate change has been cited as a potential driver of its spatial expansion on the continent, a formal evaluation of this causal relationship is lacking. Here, we investigate the extent to which WNV spatial expansion in Europe can be attributed to climate change while accounting for other direct human influences such as land-use and human population changes. To this end, we trained ecological niche models to predict the risk of local WNV circulation leading to human cases to then unravel the isolated effect of climate change by comparing factual simulations to a counterfactual based on the same environmental changes but a counterfactual climate where long-term trends have been removed. Our findings demonstrate a notable increase in the area ecologically suitable for WNV circulation during the period 1901–2019, whereas this area remains largely unchanged in a no-climate-change counterfactual. We show that the drastic increase in the human population at risk of exposure is partly due to historical changes in population density, but that climate change has also been a critical driver behind the heightened risk of WNV circulation in Europe.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1196 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 8 Feb 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors acknowledge the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) for providing data from The European Surveillance System (TESSy) on WNV human infections. Disclaimer: The views and opinions of the authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of ECDC. The accuracy of the authors’ statistical analysis and the findings they report are not the responsibility of ECDC. ECDC is not responsible for conclusions or opinions drawn from the data provided. ECDC is not responsible for the correctness of the data and for data management, data merging and data collation after provision of the data. ECDC shall not be held liable for improper or incorrect use of the data. DE acknowledges support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement no. 801505. GG acknowledges support from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS, Belgium). CBFV acknowledges support from CTSA Grant Number UL1 TR001863 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIH. SD acknowledges support from the F.R.S.-FNRS (grant no. F.4515.22) and the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO, Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen, grant no. G098321N). The outbreak research team of the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) is supported by the Department of Economy, Science and Innovation of the Flemish government, Belgium. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 874850 (MOOD project) and is catalogued as MOOD 077. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. For the production and coordination of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP; www.isimip.org) input data and impact model output, we are grateful to the modelling groups, the ISIMIP sector coordinators, and the ISIMIP cross-sectoral science team. Part of the computational resources and services used in this work were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by the FWO and the Flemish Government, department EWI.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.