Pandemics are likely – climate change magnifies the risk and makes novel disease emergence inevitable

The correlation between climate change and the spread of pathogens According to the director of Harvard University Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment, Dr. Aaron Bernstein, although there is no evidence that climate change had affected the coronavirus pandemic, climate change could increase infectious disease risks since it alters our relationship with other species. Global warming would force terrestrial and aquatic species to migrate towards the poles due to extreme heat. These migrations would lead to contact between the species that normally do not contact with each other. This would lead to the transmission of the pathogens to new species. Loss of habitat due to climate change would also lead to animal migrations and contact with new species (15). Climate change would also affect environmental biosecurity. Thus, monitoring infectious diseases, animal-human health, ecology, and environmental issues should be addressed with a holistic approach (18). Infectious diseases affect the ecology of hosts, vectors, and pathogens. Vibrio cholerae and Yersinia pestis are well studied examples of predictive waterborne and zoonotic disease modeling (19, 20). The endemic locations of infectious diseases that could be transmitted to humans by non-human vectors could change due to climate change. These changes due to global warming would increase and decrease the disease prevalence regions, potentially affecting the survival of the vectors (17).A recent study suggested that climate change would increase the likelihood of epidemics induced by animal-to-human transmissions in the future (21). It was reported that at least 10,000 viral species could infect humans, the vast majority of which currently infect only wild mammals (22, 23). However, changes in climate and land use would lead to the transmission of viruses to certain geographically isolated wildlife species (24, 25). Studies predicted that even global warming would remain below two degrees Celsius by 2070, infections by species with a high transmission potential to humans would significantly increase. Most intra-species transmissions would be a "dead end" for the viruses. However, those that would mutate and manage to find new hosts could be quite dangerous (26).Animal species would often migrate to residential or agricultural areas as they escape sweltering temperatures and other effects of climate change. Thus, the unprecedented interactions between these species would lead to transmission of pathogens, eventually infecting humans (27). The epidemics such as Ebola, HIV, bird flu, SARS, and most likely Covid-19 were induced by wildlife viruses. It was reported that rapid global warming, deadlier and more contagious pandemics could be on the horizon (27).