#EBW26 Live: Prof. Joacim Rocklöv, delivers keynote lecture I – ‘How is climate change affecting infectious disease dynamics across Europe’
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The first session of the EBW26 scientific programme was the keynote delivered by Prof. Joacim Rocklöv, Head of Heidelberg Planetary Health Hub and Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Heidelberg University. The subject of the keynote was ‘How is climate change affecting infectious disease dynamics across Europe’.
Climate change is reshaping infectious diseases in Europe, with outbreaks once considered distant or unlikely becoming more common. Prof. Rocklöv provided a forward-looking understanding on how overlapping crises are driving these shifts and explored targeted, strategic responses:
“We need to track what’s happening right now in Europe and in the world, how climate change is affecting our health and particularly infectious diseases. And it’s difficult because there is a lack of climate diagnosis. We need to attribute that.
So, we need to use sophisticated technology and models to do that. And in doing that, we also need to differentiate between socioeconomic drivers, mobility, ecological conditions and climate change that happened since industrialisation.”
Prof. Rocklöv explained that rising temperatures in Europe are linked to more diseases and that health systems and land use need to change:
“We see across a large range of diseases that they’re consistently growing up in Europe, particularly because Europe is warming twice the rate as the rest of the world. This is going to mean that we need to prepare our public health systems. We need to rethink our ecological land use design, because it’s also interacting a lot with what makes those diseases worse.”
Finally, regarding the role of the biobanking community:
“There is a huge lack of data overall. That’s what actually limits a lot of the research efforts. In my presentation and talk I showed that the research effort is skewed. For example, there are many more mosquito-borne diseases studies than zoonotic. Part of that is the lack of data and biobanks can obviously contribute a lot here, cohorts and biobanks.
So, one of the things with climate is that it’s easier to detect patterns if you have a bigger spatial contrast. Because climate, as we see, usually varies between different locations. And either we have to wait 50 years sometimes, you know, and see what happens in one location, or we can use this spatial contrast, geographical contrast, to figure out what it means. Biobanks distributed across space, in different geographies, would definitely be able to contribute very new information in this research area.”
About Prof. Joacim Rocklöv
Professor Joacim Rocklöv is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Heidelberg University with a focus on modelling of climate-sensitive infectious diseases. He heads the Heidelberg Planetary Health Hub, which is dedicated to developing and applying innovative methods to understand and predict how climate change and the polycrisis influences infectious disease dynamics and how the impact may unfold in the future.
You can read his abstract here.