Page - 48 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

48 environment- human interactions, as the consequence of a combination of environ- mental factors, like air pollution, global warming, urbanisation and microclimatic variability, which create a multi-resolution spatiotemporal system that requires new processing technologies and huge data inflow in order to be thoroughly investigated. We suggest that novel, real-time, personalised pollen information services, like mobile-app risk alerts, must  be developed to provide the optimum first line of allergy management. Keywords Climate change · Environmental medicine · Pollen allergy Highlights • Climate change contributes significantly to increasing allergy prevalence worldwide. • This chapter overviews the emerging challenges with regard to allergic diseases. • More abundant and more allergenic pollen over time will affect allergic patients. • New allergenic pollen and spatial shifts in pollen occurrence will increase sensitisation. • Real-time pollen risk alerts are needed as the first line of allergy management. 3.1 Introduction International reports have documented a progressive global increase in the burden of allergic diseases across the industrialised world over the past half century. Clinical evidence reveals a general increase in both the incidence and the prevalence of respiratory diseases, including allergic rhinitis and asthma (Bieber et  al. 2016; Bunne et  al. 2017; Burney et  al. 1994; Ninan and Russell 1992; Strachan and Ross Anderson 1992; Wüthrich et  al. 1995). Such phenomena may be related not only to air pollution and changes in lifestyle, but also to an actual increase in the amount and allergenicity of airborne allergenic pollen (Ziello et  al. 2012; Beck et  al. 2013). However, the exact relationship between these factors is not yet clear. The amount of allergenic pollen has increased in specific bioclimatic regions or for specific pol- len types (Ziello et  al. 2012), and allergenicity has been documented for only some pollutants and plant species (e.g. the ozone impact on birch; Beck et  al. 2013). A large gap in our knowledge still exists regarding global trends across different bio- geographical  regions and for a wider diversity of pollen taxa. In addition, because of ongoing climate change, emerging challenges must be dealt with, such as newly introduced allergenic pollen, changing environmental parameters leading to unpre- dictable changing health effects, an urgent need for allergy risk alerts, and person- alised environmental medicine services. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the state of the art of this topic and discuss multi-disciplinary and timely interaction between humans and the environment. A. Damialis et  al.