One Health, climate change, and infectious microbes: a joint effort between AGU and ASM to understand impacts of changing climate and microbes on human well-being across scales

Abstract

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) are collaborating to understand the complexities of a changing climate on infectious microbes and how these changes impact human health and well-being. Both scientific societies seek to understand how our changing climate and weather systems will impact human, animal, and plant health. Increasing climatic variability, including extreme weather events, coupled with human-environmental interactions, lead to increased risk of disease outbreaks, including vector-borne (e.g. Zika, dengue, chikungunya, malaria, Rift Valley fever), waterborne (e.g., cholera, dysentery, typhoid), and airborne (e.g. coronavirus, influenza) diseases. While the role of geophysical processes is increasingly appreciated as critical to modulation of microbes, the issues of scale discrepancies limit integration of microbiological understanding of pathogens into large-scale climate and weather patterns. A special collection of papers in GeoHealth and mSphere will present accumulated knowledge gathered at the interface of climate, weather, and human health, with emphasis on geophysical processes and microbiological functions, information necessary for early warning systems to be developed that can predict risk of diseases (and emergence of pathogens) under current and future changing climate scenarios. Special emphasis will be given to improving our limited arsenal against respiratory infectious pathogens associated with societal determinants and climate modalities.