Page - 80 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

80 lower infrastructural needs and may also work in large and remote areas. However, the technique lacks post-release control and the required data for environmental risk assessment are not yet available. Further research is needed before allowing the release of gene- drive insects to the wild. 4.4.4 Sustainable Control Programs The ecological risk assessment of chemical, biological and genetic vector control measures on non-target biodiversity will remain difficult because our basic knowl- edge on non-VBD biodiversity as well as on cryptic viral, microbiological, genetic, phenotypic and reservoir host biodiversity under global changes is so fragmentary. One may also hope for the future, that biodiverse nature endows us with new bio- logical insecticides and medically active compounds to help us to treat VBDs. Such ecosystem services could deliver a very good reason to preserve existing biodiver- sity and respect traditional lifestyles and related knowledge of local communities. Traditionally, single-intervention approaches such as insecticide treatment domi- nated the toolbox of vector control managers in the past. The Integrated Vector Control Management (IVM) makes use of vector surveillance, risk mapping and a variety of vector prevention and control tools, and adjusts the set of applied tools to local conditions in a time- and dose-dependent manner. However, it must be kept in mind that just a reduction of mosquito breeding sites (prevention), use of insecti- cides (control), IVM or SIT have brought only few benefits in the attempt to control the vector populations (Baldacchino et  al. 2015). Building sustainable control pro- grams that are resilient in the face of technical, operational and financial challenges will in addition require the engagement and collaboration of local communities. Efforts to limit the breeding of disease vectors are often hampered by lack of community awareness of the interconnections between disease, vectors and viruses/ parasites. On the other hand, community mobilisation and the implementation of an integrated community-based approach can probably render dengue fever control effective (Andersson et  al. 2015; Mitchell-Foster et  al. 2015). Lessons learned from previous studies should be used to inform previously VBD-unaffected populations. For example, a study from Nepal shows that only 12% of the sample population had good knowledge of dengue fever and those living in the lowlands with regular out- breaks of mosquito-borne diseases were five times more likely to possess good knowledge than highlanders experiencing rare or zero outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases (Dhimal et  al. 2014b). Thus, VBD-naïve populations such as in remote mountainous regions may be at special risk under the impact of climate change fostering the spread of disease vectors to cooler ecoregions (Dhimal et  al. 2014a, b, c, 2015; Escobar et  al. 2016). The same might be true for northern/temperate regions if considering altitude as a proxy for temperature conditions. R. Müller et al.