Page - 68 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

68 Keywords Mosquito-borne · Tick-borne · One Health · Planetary health · Vector diversity · Vector control Highlights • Climatic change shapes the regional distribution and abundance of disease vectors. • There are important knowledge gaps with relation to VBDs and biodiversity. • A variety of new biological and genetic vector control tools are under development. • VBD control needs a trans-sectoral One Health approach, not just the health sector. • VBD control and elimination should be based on a wider understanding of plan- etary health. 4.1 Triple Vulnerability: Climate Change, Biodiversity and  Vector-Borne Diseases Both climate change and biodiversity loss are current challenges to humankind. Climate and biodiversity change have health impacts that range widely from direct effects such as progressive temperature increases from global warming, flooding or heat waves due to increased climate variability and extreme weather events, to indi- rect effects such as changes in ecosystem services, food productivity or species distributions (Montag et  al. 2017). Indirect effects also include the redistribution of vector species or extended seasonal transmission periods and spatial extension, as well as the disappearance of vector-borne diseases (VBDs). VBDs are illnesses caused by parasites, viruses or bacteria that are transmitted by a vector, such as mosquitoes, ticks, sandflies, triatomine bugs, tsetse flies, fleas, black flies, aquatic snails and lice (Table  4.1, WHO 2017a). The current spatial dis- tributions of ten important vector-borne diseases are shown in Fig.  4.1. Currently, on average, 77,000 people living in Europe fall sick from VBDs every year, but numbers are predicted to increase as vector species emerge (e.g. the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus) or re-emerge (e.g. the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti) (http://www.euro.who.int/en/media-centre/sections/press-releases/ 2014/77-000-europeans-fall-sick-every-year-with-vector-borne-diseases). Globally, every year there are more than 700,000 deaths from zoonotic vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, schistosomiasis, human African trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis and onchocerciasis (WHO 2017a). These zoonotic diseases account for around 17% of the estimated global burden of communicable diseases and disproportionately affect poorer populations that live in environmentally degraded environments and housing conditions that are favourable to VBDs (WHO 2017a). They impede economic R. Müller et al.