Climate-Driven Global Expansion of Dengue Endemicity

Human-accelerated global changes to climate and land use are fundamentally altering the dynamics of infectious diseases. Driven by these forces, mosquito-borne dengue virus (DENV) is rapidly emerging into Florida, Europe, and parts of South America, putting millions of people at risk and disrupting health systems. This project will use machine learning to define the necessary climate and socio-economic conditions for DENV transmission, predict the real-time expansion of endemic transmission due to climate change, and develop public health tools to locally track this expansion in real-time. The project team will evaluate their models by working with the Florida Department of Health, where DENV is an urgent problem. The impact of this project will go beyond the study of DENV, allowing knowledge transfer to other major vector-borne disease systems affected by climate change, and to climate-based global health planning more generally.