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Pregnant in a warming climate: A lethal "double risk" for malaria

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Monday, June 3, 2024

Roger Casupang was working in a coastal clinic on the north side of Papua New Guinea, an island nation of 9 million in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, when a pregnant woman burst into his facility. She was in labor, moments away from delivering twins. She also had a severe case of malaria, a life-threatening mosquito-borne illness common in tropical countries. Casupang, an obstetrician, quickly took stock of the situation. When the parent is healthy, a twin pregnancy is twice as risky as a single pregnancy. Meanwhile, severe malaria kills nearly half of the people who develop it during pregnancy. The woman was exhausted and delirious. Because many of his patients walked for days to get medical care for standard ailments, Casupang didn’t know which province she had come from or how long she had been traveling before she reached his clinic.  What he did know was that the woman had arrived just in time. “She was actually pushing when she came in,” he said.  Casupang, who was born in one of Papua New Guinea’s highland provinces and had been practicing medicine on the island for the better part of a decade at the time, had seen pregnant women die in less dire circumstances. Against all odds, with limited medical resources and medicines at their disposal, Casupang and the other medical professionals at the clinic were able to deliver the twins safely. Both babies weighed less than three pounds each, a consequence of their mother’s raging infection. The twins were moved to the nursery while Casupang and his fellow physicians worked to stabilize the mother. She was reunited with her babies after 10 days of intensive care. “If this case had presented in a remote facility,” Casupang said, “the narrative would have been very different.”  Casupang’s patient was lucky to survive — but she also benefited from geography. On the coast, doctors see lots of patients with malaria, and many of those patients carry antibodies that protect them from severe infection.  But malaria is on the move.  Temperatures are rising around the world but particularly in countries where the disease is already present. That warming coaxes mosquitoes toward higher elevations, even as temperatures have historically been too cold for the insects to thrive. In these high-altitude areas, mosquitoes are feeding on people who have never had malaria before — and who are much more susceptible to deadly infections. “When malaria hits new populations that are naive, you tend to get these explosive epidemics that are severe because people don’t have any existing immunity,” said Sadie Ryan, an associate professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.  Pregnant people living in highland regions who have never had malaria before are worst-positioned to survive the bite of an infected mosquito. The very act of becoming pregnant creates a potentially deadly vulnerability to malaria. The placenta, the new organ that forms to nourish the fetus, presents new receptors for the disease to bind to.  Pregnant women are three times more likely to develop severe malaria compared to nonpregnant women. For people who can become pregnant, the climate-driven upward movement of malaria mosquitoes poses nothing less than an existential threat. “In Western countries, especially where malaria is not endemic, there is this perception that malaria has been around for so long that we already know how to deal with it,” said Deekshita Ramanarayanan, who works on maternal health at the nonpartisan research organization the Wilson Center.  But that was never the case, and the perception is especially flawed now, as climate change threatens to rewrite the malaria-control playbook. “Pregnant people are hit with this double risk factor of climate change and the risks of contracting malaria during pregnancy,” Ramanarayanan said.  Hundreds of millions of people get malaria every year, and an estimated 2.7 million die from it, mostly in tropical and subtropical regions. In 2022, 94 percent of global malaria cases occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. High rates of the disease are also found in Central America and the Caribbean, South America, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific. Papua New Guinea registered over 400,000 new cases in 2022. That same year the country accounted for 90 percent of the malaria cases in the western Pacific.   Malaria is carried by dozens of species of Anopheles mosquitoes, also known as marsh or nail mosquitoes. Anopheles mosquitoes carry a parasite called Plasmodium — the single-cell genus that causes malaria in birds, reptiles, and mammals like humans.  When the bite of an Anopheles mosquito introduces Plasmodium into the human bloodstream, the parasites travel to the liver, where they lurk undetectably and mature for a period ranging from weeks to a year. Once the parasites reach maturity, they venture out into the bloodstream and infect red blood cells. The host often experiences symptoms at this stage of the infection — fever, chills, nausea, and general, flu-like discomfort.  The earlier a malaria infection is caught, the better the chances that antimalarial medications can help prevent the development of severe malaria, when the disease spreads to critical organs in the body.  Pregnancy primes the body for infection.  The immune system, when it is functioning properly, engages an arsenal of weapons to ward off bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens. But pregnancy acts like an immunosuppressant, telling the defense system to stand down in order to ensure the body does not inadvertently reject the growing baby. “Your immune system is, on purpose, dialed back so that you can tolerate the fact that you have this fetus inside of you,” said Marya Zlatnik, an obstetrician and gynecologist at University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Then there’s the added strain of supplying the baby with enough nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. The body must work overtime to provide for the metabolic needs of two. This factor, exacerbated by poverty, malnutrition, and subpar medical infrastructure in countries where malaria is commonly found, poses enormous challenges to maternal and fetal health. A malaria infection on top of those existing vulnerabilities introduces another, even more challenging set of obstacles. The disease can produce severe maternal anemia, iron deficiency, or it can spread to the kidneys and the lungs and cause a condition known as blackwater fever. The disorder makes patients jaundiced, feverish, and dangerously low on vitamins crucial for a healthy pregnancy.  “It’s pretty much synonymous with death for many patients up in the rural areas,” Casupang said. Research shows that malaria may be a factor in a quarter of all maternal deaths in the countries where the disease is endemic.  Plasmodium parasites have spikes on them, similar to the now-infamous coronavirus spike proteins, that make them sticky and prone to clogging up organs. If Plasmodium travel to the placenta, the parasites bind to placental receptors and cause portions of the placenta to die off. “It changes the architecture of the placenta and the ways nutrients and oxygen are exchanged with the fetus,” said Courtney Murdock, an associate professor at Cornell University’s department of entomology. The placental clots interfere with fetal growth, and they’re one of the reasons why a pregnant woman is between three and four times more likely to miscarry if she has a malaria infection, and why babies born to mothers sick with malaria come out of the womb malnourished and underweight.  “You see the placenta start to fail,” Casupang said. Fetal mortality is closely tied to how much of the placenta becomes oxygen deprived. “The babies come out with very low birth weights,” he said. If the placental clots are extensive, “they usually die.”  In 2020, approximately 122 million pregnancies — about half of all pregnancies worldwide that year — occurred in areas where people were at risk of contracting malaria. A 2023 study estimated that 16 million of these pregnancies ended in miscarriage, and 1.4 million in stillbirth.  Researchers don’t know exactly how many of those miscarriages and stillbirths occurred in individuals who were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes.  However, the World Health Organization estimates that approximately 35 percent of pregnant people in African countries with moderate to high malaria transmission were exposed to the disease during pregnancy in 2022. A widespread lack of health data in poor countries makes it nearly impossible to know how many of those infections resulted in maternal, fetal, or infant death. “Unfortunately, it is only safe to say that we do not have good morbidity estimates at this point,” said Feiko ter Kuile, chair in tropical epidemiology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Researchers have said that out of all the high-impact infectious diseases — including Ebola, mpox (formerly known as monkeypox), and MERS — malaria is the “most sensitive to the relationship of human populations to their environment.” In Papua New Guinea, the coastal zones that sit near or at sea level have long had environmental conditions that foster the development and spread of the Anopheles mosquito. Cases of malaria topped 1.5 million in 2020, and the vast majority occurred in the nation’s lowlands.  At 4,000 feet or more above sea level, where some 40 percent of the Papua New Guinean population lives, temperatures have historically been too cold for Anopheles mosquitoes to thrive year-round. There have been seasonal outbreaks of malaria in those zones, but the background hum of malaria present in the lowlands largely disappears above the 4,000 feet mark. At 5,200 feet above sea level, periodic freezes kill mosquitoes and prevent them from establishing widely, making malaria infections there very rare. But climate change is expanding the areas where Anopheles mosquitoes and the Plasmodium they carry flourish by fostering warmer, wetter environments. Mosquitoes thrive in the aftermath of big storms, when the insects have ample opportunity to breed in standing pools of water.  At the same time, higher-than-average temperatures almost everywhere in the world mark the beginning of a new chapter in humanity’s long struggle to contain mosquitoes and the diseases they carry. Anopheles mosquitoes grow into adults more quickly in warmer weather, and longer warm seasons allow them to breed faster and stay active longer.  This poses problems in areas where Anopheles mosquitoes are already prevalent, and in regions the insects are poised to infiltrate. The mountainous regions of the world — the Himalayas, the Andes, the East African highlands — are thawing as average global temperatures climb. What used to be an inhospitable habitat is becoming fertile ground for malaria transmission. Like their mosquito hosts, Plasmodium parasites are sensitive to temperature. The two most common strains, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax, like temperatures in the range of 56 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The warmer the weather, the more quickly the parasites are able to reach their infectious stage. A study that examined temperatures suitable to Plasmodium in the western Himalaya mountains predicted that, by 2040, the mountain range’s high-elevation sites — 8,500 feet above sea level — “will have a temperature range conducive for malaria transmission.”   There’s little data on the rate at which Anopheles mosquitoes and the parasites they carry are moving upward in Papua New Guinea, but research shows temperatures across Papua New Guinea were, on average, just under 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) warmer between 2000 and 2017 than they were a century prior. A report conducted by the World Bank Group noted that this temperature rise “has been fastest in the minimum temperatures,” meaning climate change jeopardizes the overnight low temperatures that are so essential to mosquito control. Anecdotally, doctors and nurses working in the country’s colder regions say they have seen a familiar pattern begin to change.  Stella Silihtau works in the emergency department at the Eastern Highlands Provincial Health Authority in Goroka, a town of 20,000 that sits at 5,200 feet above sea level on a major road that connects the scattered highland cities and towns to the communities along the coast. Silihtau and her colleagues are no strangers to malaria. Hundreds of people in Goroka and surrounding highland towns grow cash crops like coffee, tea, rubber, and sugarcane and ferry them down to the coast every week to sell to plantations and community boards. The highland dwellers are bitten by mosquitoes at lower elevations, and end up at the hospital where Silihtau works weeks later, sick with malaria. Over the past year, she’s seen unusual cases starting to crop up. “We’ve been seeing a lot of patients that are coming in with malaria,” said Silihtau, who grew up in the lowlands. Many of these cases have been in people who have not traveled at all. “We’ve seen mild cases, severe cases, they go into psychosis,” she said. Silihtau and her colleagues don’t have the time or staff to keep close track of how many locally acquired malaria cases have been treated at the hospital over the past year. But Silihtau estimates that when she first started working at the hospital in Goroka two years ago, she saw one case per eight-hour shift, or none at all. Now, she sees between two and three cases of malaria per shift, some of them in individuals who have not traveled outside the boundaries of Papua New Guinea’s highland zones. “It’s a new trend,” Silihtau said.  The new dangers that the upward movement of malaria mosquitoes pose to pregnant people are obfuscated by positive signals in malaria cases globally.  Global malaria deaths plummeted 36 percent between 2010 and 2020, the dive driven by wider implementation of the standard, relatively low-cost treatments that research shows are incredibly effective at preventing severe infections: insecticide-treated mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs, and malaria tests.  This promising trend stalled in 2022, when there were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria globally — up 5 million from 2021. Much of the increase can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which slowed various global infectious disease control efforts as health care systems tried to contain an entirely new threat. Funding for malaria control is also falling short. Countries spent a total of $4.1 billion on malaria in 2022, nowhere near the $7.8 billion in funding the World Health Organization says is necessary annually to reduce the global health burden of the disease 90 percent by 2030.  Meanwhile, cases have been rising in step with the spread of a mosquito called Anopheles stephensi, a species that can carry two different strains of Plasmodium and, unlike the rest of its Anopheles brethren, thrives in urban environments. Efforts to control malaria in both urban and rural settings are stymied by the quickening pace and severity of extreme weather events, which scramble vaccination and mosquito net distribution campaigns, shutter health clinics, and interrupt medical supply chains. Record-breaking storms, which destroy homes and public infrastructure and create thousands of internal migrants, force governments in developing countries to choose where to allocate limited funding. Infectious disease control programs are often the first to go. The world’s slowly warming highland regions are one small thread in the web of factors influencing the prevalence of malaria. But because of the lack of immunity among populations in upper elevations, the movement of malaria into these zones poses a unique threat to pregnant people — one that may grow to constitute a disproportionate fraction of the overall impact of malaria as climate change continues to worsen.  “Pregnant women are going to be a high-risk population in highland areas,” said Chandy C. John, a professor and researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine who has conducted malaria research in Kenya and Uganda for 20 years. John and his colleagues are in the process of analyzing their two decades of health data to try to tease out the potential effects of climate on malaria cases. “What are we seeing in terms of rainfall and temperature and how they relate to risk of malaria over time in these areas?” he asked. His study will add to the small but growing body of research on how temperature shifts in high elevations contribute to the prevalence of malaria. Controlling and even eradicating malaria isn’t just possible; it has already been done. Dozens of countries have banished the disease; Cabo Verde recently became the third African country to be certified as malaria-free. “Malaria is such a complex disease,” said Jennifer Gardy, deputy director for malaria surveillance, data, and epidemiology at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “but that complexity is kind of beautiful because it means we’ve got so many different intervention points.”  In addition to the typical interventions such as mosquito nets, the Papua New Guinea National Department of Health has had some success with medical therapies for people who develop malaria infections while pregnant. Doctors there and in many other malaria-endemic places use intermittent preventive treatment on pregnant women. The antimalarial is administered orally as soon as patients learn they are pregnant and, if taken on regularly, can significantly reduce the chances of severe malaria over the course of gestation. The treatment remains difficult to access in highland regions, as malaria has historically been uncommon there. If governments and hospitals pay attention and get these medicines into places where rising temperatures are changing climatic constraints on mosquitoes, they will save lives.  The smartest solutions are those that address malaria as a symptom of a wider system of inequity. Papua New Guinea is a “patriarchal society where men get the best treatment,” Casupang, who now works for an international emergency medicine and security company called International SOS, said. “Women are pretty much regarded as commodities.” Most married women must seek permission from their husbands to seek medical care at a facility, and permission is not always granted. Many women are also prevented from seeking medical attention by poverty, by the quality of the roads that connect rural villages to cities, and because they don’t recognize the symptoms of malaria or understand the risks the infection poses to themselves and their unborn children, Casupang said. Just 55 percent of women in Papua New Guinea give birth in a health facility, a partial function of the fact that the country currently has less than a quarter of the medical personnel it needs to care for mothers, babies, and children. “There are quite a number of factors that will determine the outcome of a mother that has malaria,” Casupang said. “The most important thing is access to a health care facility.” He’s one of many experts who argue that better infrastructure, improvements in education, and the implementation of policies that protect women and girls double as malaria control measures — not just in Papua New Guinea but everywhere poverty creates footholds for infectious diseases to take root and flourish. “Education, a living wage, sanitation, and all of these other very basic things can do so much for a disease like malaria,” John said. “It’s not a mosquito net or a vaccine, but it can make such a huge difference for the population.” This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/health/fertility-climate-change-pregnancy-malaria-placenta-mosquito/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org Read more about mosquitoes and pandemics

Mosquitoes are moving into the mountains of Papua New Guinea and other highland areas. It could be a death sentence

Roger Casupang was working in a coastal clinic on the north side of Papua New Guinea, an island nation of 9 million in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, when a pregnant woman burst into his facility. She was in labor, moments away from delivering twins. She also had a severe case of malaria, a life-threatening mosquito-borne illness common in tropical countries.

Casupang, an obstetrician, quickly took stock of the situation. When the parent is healthy, a twin pregnancy is twice as risky as a single pregnancy. Meanwhile, severe malaria kills nearly half of the people who develop it during pregnancy. The woman was exhausted and delirious. Because many of his patients walked for days to get medical care for standard ailments, Casupang didn’t know which province she had come from or how long she had been traveling before she reached his clinic. 

What he did know was that the woman had arrived just in time. “She was actually pushing when she came in,” he said. 

Casupang, who was born in one of Papua New Guinea’s highland provinces and had been practicing medicine on the island for the better part of a decade at the time, had seen pregnant women die in less dire circumstances. Against all odds, with limited medical resources and medicines at their disposal, Casupang and the other medical professionals at the clinic were able to deliver the twins safely. Both babies weighed less than three pounds each, a consequence of their mother’s raging infection. The twins were moved to the nursery while Casupang and his fellow physicians worked to stabilize the mother. She was reunited with her babies after 10 days of intensive care. “If this case had presented in a remote facility,” Casupang said, “the narrative would have been very different.” 

Casupang’s patient was lucky to survive — but she also benefited from geography. On the coast, doctors see lots of patients with malaria, and many of those patients carry antibodies that protect them from severe infection. 

But malaria is on the move. 

Temperatures are rising around the world but particularly in countries where the disease is already present. That warming coaxes mosquitoes toward higher elevations, even as temperatures have historically been too cold for the insects to thrive. In these high-altitude areas, mosquitoes are feeding on people who have never had malaria before — and who are much more susceptible to deadly infections.

“When malaria hits new populations that are naive, you tend to get these explosive epidemics that are severe because people don’t have any existing immunity,” said Sadie Ryan, an associate professor of medical geography at the University of Florida. 

Pregnant people living in highland regions who have never had malaria before are worst-positioned to survive the bite of an infected mosquito. The very act of becoming pregnant creates a potentially deadly vulnerability to malaria. The placenta, the new organ that forms to nourish the fetus, presents new receptors for the disease to bind to. 

Pregnant women are three times more likely to develop severe malaria compared to nonpregnant women. For people who can become pregnant, the climate-driven upward movement of malaria mosquitoes poses nothing less than an existential threat.

“In Western countries, especially where malaria is not endemic, there is this perception that malaria has been around for so long that we already know how to deal with it,” said Deekshita Ramanarayanan, who works on maternal health at the nonpartisan research organization the Wilson Center. 

But that was never the case, and the perception is especially flawed now, as climate change threatens to rewrite the malaria-control playbook. “Pregnant people are hit with this double risk factor of climate change and the risks of contracting malaria during pregnancy,” Ramanarayanan said. 

Hundreds of millions of people get malaria every year, and an estimated 2.7 million die from it, mostly in tropical and subtropical regions. In 2022, 94 percent of global malaria cases occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. High rates of the disease are also found in Central America and the Caribbean, South America, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific. Papua New Guinea registered over 400,000 new cases in 2022. That same year the country accounted for 90 percent of the malaria cases in the western Pacific.  

Malaria is carried by dozens of species of Anopheles mosquitoes, also known as marsh or nail mosquitoes. Anopheles mosquitoes carry a parasite called Plasmodium — the single-cell genus that causes malaria in birds, reptiles, and mammals like humans. 

When the bite of an Anopheles mosquito introduces Plasmodium into the human bloodstream, the parasites travel to the liver, where they lurk undetectably and mature for a period ranging from weeks to a year. Once the parasites reach maturity, they venture out into the bloodstream and infect red blood cells. The host often experiences symptoms at this stage of the infection — fever, chills, nausea, and general, flu-like discomfort. 

The earlier a malaria infection is caught, the better the chances that antimalarial medications can help prevent the development of severe malaria, when the disease spreads to critical organs in the body. 

Pregnancy primes the body for infection. 

The immune system, when it is functioning properly, engages an arsenal of weapons to ward off bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens. But pregnancy acts like an immunosuppressant, telling the defense system to stand down in order to ensure the body does not inadvertently reject the growing baby. “Your immune system is, on purpose, dialed back so that you can tolerate the fact that you have this fetus inside of you,” said Marya Zlatnik, an obstetrician and gynecologist at University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.

Then there’s the added strain of supplying the baby with enough nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. The body must work overtime to provide for the metabolic needs of two. This factor, exacerbated by poverty, malnutrition, and subpar medical infrastructure in countries where malaria is commonly found, poses enormous challenges to maternal and fetal health. A malaria infection on top of those existing vulnerabilities introduces another, even more challenging set of obstacles.

The disease can produce severe maternal anemia, iron deficiency, or it can spread to the kidneys and the lungs and cause a condition known as blackwater fever. The disorder makes patients jaundiced, feverish, and dangerously low on vitamins crucial for a healthy pregnancy. 

“It’s pretty much synonymous with death for many patients up in the rural areas,” Casupang said. Research shows that malaria may be a factor in a quarter of all maternal deaths in the countries where the disease is endemic. 

Plasmodium parasites have spikes on them, similar to the now-infamous coronavirus spike proteins, that make them sticky and prone to clogging up organs. If Plasmodium travel to the placenta, the parasites bind to placental receptors and cause portions of the placenta to die off. “It changes the architecture of the placenta and the ways nutrients and oxygen are exchanged with the fetus,” said Courtney Murdock, an associate professor at Cornell University’s department of entomology. The placental clots interfere with fetal growth, and they’re one of the reasons why a pregnant woman is between three and four times more likely to miscarry if she has a malaria infection, and why babies born to mothers sick with malaria come out of the womb malnourished and underweight. 

“You see the placenta start to fail,” Casupang said. Fetal mortality is closely tied to how much of the placenta becomes oxygen deprived. “The babies come out with very low birth weights,” he said. If the placental clots are extensive, “they usually die.” 

In 2020, approximately 122 million pregnancies — about half of all pregnancies worldwide that year — occurred in areas where people were at risk of contracting malaria. A 2023 study estimated that 16 million of these pregnancies ended in miscarriage, and 1.4 million in stillbirth. 

Researchers don’t know exactly how many of those miscarriages and stillbirths occurred in individuals who were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes. 

However, the World Health Organization estimates that approximately 35 percent of pregnant people in African countries with moderate to high malaria transmission were exposed to the disease during pregnancy in 2022. A widespread lack of health data in poor countries makes it nearly impossible to know how many of those infections resulted in maternal, fetal, or infant death. “Unfortunately, it is only safe to say that we do not have good morbidity estimates at this point,” said Feiko ter Kuile, chair in tropical epidemiology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Researchers have said that out of all the high-impact infectious diseases — including Ebola, mpox (formerly known as monkeypox), and MERS — malaria is the “most sensitive to the relationship of human populations to their environment.” In Papua New Guinea, the coastal zones that sit near or at sea level have long had environmental conditions that foster the development and spread of the Anopheles mosquito. Cases of malaria topped 1.5 million in 2020, and the vast majority occurred in the nation’s lowlands. 

At 4,000 feet or more above sea level, where some 40 percent of the Papua New Guinean population lives, temperatures have historically been too cold for Anopheles mosquitoes to thrive year-round. There have been seasonal outbreaks of malaria in those zones, but the background hum of malaria present in the lowlands largely disappears above the 4,000 feet mark. At 5,200 feet above sea level, periodic freezes kill mosquitoes and prevent them from establishing widely, making malaria infections there very rare.

But climate change is expanding the areas where Anopheles mosquitoes and the Plasmodium they carry flourish by fostering warmer, wetter environments. Mosquitoes thrive in the aftermath of big storms, when the insects have ample opportunity to breed in standing pools of water. 

At the same time, higher-than-average temperatures almost everywhere in the world mark the beginning of a new chapter in humanity’s long struggle to contain mosquitoes and the diseases they carry. Anopheles mosquitoes grow into adults more quickly in warmer weather, and longer warm seasons allow them to breed faster and stay active longer. 

This poses problems in areas where Anopheles mosquitoes are already prevalent, and in regions the insects are poised to infiltrate. The mountainous regions of the world — the Himalayas, the Andes, the East African highlands — are thawing as average global temperatures climb. What used to be an inhospitable habitat is becoming fertile ground for malaria transmission.

Like their mosquito hosts, Plasmodium parasites are sensitive to temperature. The two most common strains, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax, like temperatures in the range of 56 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The warmer the weather, the more quickly the parasites are able to reach their infectious stage. A study that examined temperatures suitable to Plasmodium in the western Himalaya mountains predicted that, by 2040, the mountain range’s high-elevation sites — 8,500 feet above sea level — “will have a temperature range conducive for malaria transmission.”  

There’s little data on the rate at which Anopheles mosquitoes and the parasites they carry are moving upward in Papua New Guinea, but research shows temperatures across Papua New Guinea were, on average, just under 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) warmer between 2000 and 2017 than they were a century prior. A report conducted by the World Bank Group noted that this temperature rise “has been fastest in the minimum temperatures,” meaning climate change jeopardizes the overnight low temperatures that are so essential to mosquito control. Anecdotally, doctors and nurses working in the country’s colder regions say they have seen a familiar pattern begin to change. 

Stella Silihtau works in the emergency department at the Eastern Highlands Provincial Health Authority in Goroka, a town of 20,000 that sits at 5,200 feet above sea level on a major road that connects the scattered highland cities and towns to the communities along the coast. Silihtau and her colleagues are no strangers to malaria. Hundreds of people in Goroka and surrounding highland towns grow cash crops like coffee, tea, rubber, and sugarcane and ferry them down to the coast every week to sell to plantations and community boards. The highland dwellers are bitten by mosquitoes at lower elevations, and end up at the hospital where Silihtau works weeks later, sick with malaria. Over the past year, she’s seen unusual cases starting to crop up.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of patients that are coming in with malaria,” said Silihtau, who grew up in the lowlands. Many of these cases have been in people who have not traveled at all. “We’ve seen mild cases, severe cases, they go into psychosis,” she said.

Silihtau and her colleagues don’t have the time or staff to keep close track of how many locally acquired malaria cases have been treated at the hospital over the past year. But Silihtau estimates that when she first started working at the hospital in Goroka two years ago, she saw one case per eight-hour shift, or none at all. Now, she sees between two and three cases of malaria per shift, some of them in individuals who have not traveled outside the boundaries of Papua New Guinea’s highland zones. “It’s a new trend,” Silihtau said. 

The new dangers that the upward movement of malaria mosquitoes pose to pregnant people are obfuscated by positive signals in malaria cases globally. 

Global malaria deaths plummeted 36 percent between 2010 and 2020, the dive driven by wider implementation of the standard, relatively low-cost treatments that research shows are incredibly effective at preventing severe infections: insecticide-treated mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs, and malaria tests. 

This promising trend stalled in 2022, when there were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria globally — up 5 million from 2021. Much of the increase can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which slowed various global infectious disease control efforts as health care systems tried to contain an entirely new threat. Funding for malaria control is also falling short. Countries spent a total of $4.1 billion on malaria in 2022, nowhere near the $7.8 billion in funding the World Health Organization says is necessary annually to reduce the global health burden of the disease 90 percent by 2030. 

Meanwhile, cases have been rising in step with the spread of a mosquito called Anopheles stephensi, a species that can carry two different strains of Plasmodium and, unlike the rest of its Anopheles brethren, thrives in urban environments. Efforts to control malaria in both urban and rural settings are stymied by the quickening pace and severity of extreme weather events, which scramble vaccination and mosquito net distribution campaigns, shutter health clinics, and interrupt medical supply chains. Record-breaking storms, which destroy homes and public infrastructure and create thousands of internal migrants, force governments in developing countries to choose where to allocate limited funding. Infectious disease control programs are often the first to go.

The world’s slowly warming highland regions are one small thread in the web of factors influencing the prevalence of malaria. But because of the lack of immunity among populations in upper elevations, the movement of malaria into these zones poses a unique threat to pregnant people — one that may grow to constitute a disproportionate fraction of the overall impact of malaria as climate change continues to worsen. 

“Pregnant women are going to be a high-risk population in highland areas,” said Chandy C. John, a professor and researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine who has conducted malaria research in Kenya and Uganda for 20 years. John and his colleagues are in the process of analyzing their two decades of health data to try to tease out the potential effects of climate on malaria cases. “What are we seeing in terms of rainfall and temperature and how they relate to risk of malaria over time in these areas?” he asked. His study will add to the small but growing body of research on how temperature shifts in high elevations contribute to the prevalence of malaria.

Controlling and even eradicating malaria isn’t just possible; it has already been done. Dozens of countries have banished the disease; Cabo Verde recently became the third African country to be certified as malaria-free. “Malaria is such a complex disease,” said Jennifer Gardy, deputy director for malaria surveillance, data, and epidemiology at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “but that complexity is kind of beautiful because it means we’ve got so many different intervention points.” 

In addition to the typical interventions such as mosquito nets, the Papua New Guinea National Department of Health has had some success with medical therapies for people who develop malaria infections while pregnant. Doctors there and in many other malaria-endemic places use intermittent preventive treatment on pregnant women. The antimalarial is administered orally as soon as patients learn they are pregnant and, if taken on regularly, can significantly reduce the chances of severe malaria over the course of gestation. The treatment remains difficult to access in highland regions, as malaria has historically been uncommon there. If governments and hospitals pay attention and get these medicines into places where rising temperatures are changing climatic constraints on mosquitoes, they will save lives. 

The smartest solutions are those that address malaria as a symptom of a wider system of inequity. Papua New Guinea is a “patriarchal society where men get the best treatment,” Casupang, who now works for an international emergency medicine and security company called International SOS, said. “Women are pretty much regarded as commodities.” Most married women must seek permission from their husbands to seek medical care at a facility, and permission is not always granted. Many women are also prevented from seeking medical attention by poverty, by the quality of the roads that connect rural villages to cities, and because they don’t recognize the symptoms of malaria or understand the risks the infection poses to themselves and their unborn children, Casupang said. Just 55 percent of women in Papua New Guinea give birth in a health facility, a partial function of the fact that the country currently has less than a quarter of the medical personnel it needs to care for mothers, babies, and children.

“There are quite a number of factors that will determine the outcome of a mother that has malaria,” Casupang said. “The most important thing is access to a health care facility.” He’s one of many experts who argue that better infrastructure, improvements in education, and the implementation of policies that protect women and girls double as malaria control measures — not just in Papua New Guinea but everywhere poverty creates footholds for infectious diseases to take root and flourish.

“Education, a living wage, sanitation, and all of these other very basic things can do so much for a disease like malaria,” John said. “It’s not a mosquito net or a vaccine, but it can make such a huge difference for the population.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/health/fertility-climate-change-pregnancy-malaria-placenta-mosquito/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Controversial UK oil field publishes full scale of climate impact

The impact from the Rosebank oil field is estimated at nearly 250 million tonnes of planet warming CO2.

The UK's largest undeveloped oil field has revealed the full scale of its environmental impact, should it gain approval by the government.Developers of the Rosebank oil field said nearly 250 million tonnes of planet warming gas would be released from using oil products from the field.The amount would vary each year, but by comparison the UK's annual emissions in 2024 were 371 million tonnes.The field's developer said its emissions were "not significant" considering the UK's international climate commitments.Rosebank is an oil and gas field which lies about 80 miles north-west of Shetland and is one of the largest undeveloped discoveries of fossil fuels in UK waters.It is said to contain up to 300 million barrels of oil and some gas, and is owned by Norwegian energy giant Equinor and British firm Ithaca Energy.The field was originally approved in 2023, but in July a court ruled that a more detailed assessment of the field's environmental impact was required, taking into account the effect on the climate of burning any fossil fuels extracted from it.A public consultation has now been opened, and will run until 20th November 2025.The final decision on whether to approve the field will be made by the Energy Secretary.Until recently such projects were only required to consider the impact on the environment from extracting the fossil fuels.But in June last year the Supreme Court ruled that authorities must take account of the impact from also using the products, after a woman in Surrey challenged the development of her local gas project.This ruling was then used in a further challenge to the Rosebank oil field by environmental campaigners Uplift and Greenpeace - which was subsequently successful in January. Equinor was required to recalculate the "full impact" of the field and it now estimates that it will contribute an additional 249 million tonnes of the planet warming gas CO2 over the next 25 years. This is more than 50 times greater than the original figure of 4.5 million tonnes it gave from extracting the oil and gas.The UK has a target to produce no additional emissions by 2050 and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been vocal about the need to move away from fossil fuels. On Tuesday, he told an industry conference that the UK's dependence on fossil fuels was its "Achilles' heel" and argued clean power was the only way to reduce bills.The fossil fuels for the Rosebank field are not guaranteed to be used in the UK but would be sold on the international market.As such the project is unlikely to have an impact on lowering gas prices. The UK's independent climate advisors said in 2022 that any more domestic oil and gas extraction would have "at most, a marginal effect on prices".But Arne Gurtner, Equinor's senior vice president for the UK, has previously said that: "If the UK needs Rosebank oil, it will go to the UK through open market mechanisms."

Climate
Energy
Water

The Blue-State Governors Who’ve Gone Weak on Climate Policy

If you scroll California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press releases, a portrait emerges of a undaunted climate fighter. One day he’s “paving [the] way for climate pollution-cutting technology”; another he’s launching “new international climate partnerships as Trump unleashes unhinged UN rant.” Last month, he announced the signing of a suite of measures “saving billions on electric bills, stabilizing [the] gas market and cutting pollution.” But look under the hood, and his heroic self-image dims somewhat. That big legislative package, for instance, also increases oil drilling and sets up a regional electricity market that “could tether California to fossil-fuel states at a time when the Trump administration is moving to roll back clean energy,” CalMatters reported.With Trump in death-drive mode on climate, canceling renewable energy projects left and right and even forbidding federal agencies to use language such as “climate change,” “green,”or “sustainable,” blue-state governors are well positioned to distinguish themselves and their party on the issue. They also have a responsibility: The states are our best hope for policy at a scale to match the problem. Yet a worrying trend is taking shape: Blue-state governors are making a big show of battling the Trump administration, but on climate issues they’ve been disappointing—and sometimes downright infuriating. Last month’s climate package wasn’t the California Democrats’ first flub this year. Over the summer, in what Politico dubbed the state’s “Great Climate Retreat,” they weakened limits on the carbon intensity of transportation fuels, rolled back environmental reviews for new housing, and lifted a cap on oil industry profits. “California was the vocal climate leader during the first Trump administration,” Chris Chavez, deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air, told Politico. “It’s questionable whether or not that leadership is still there.” In Maryland, a climate advisory panel appointed by Governor Wes Moore has hit the brakes on a carbon trading measure, and late last month the state Department of the Environment, or MDE, appeared to cave to the Trump administration in abandoning some environmental justice metrics, which many fear means abandoning Black and brown communities to the whims of polluters. “It just appears to me that MDE blatantly does not want to be accountable in the massive pollution and the overburden of these heavy industrial industries,” Kamita Gray, a community leader in Brandywine—a majority-Black town that’s home to gas-fired power plants, a coal ash dump, and a Superfund site—told Maryland Matters.Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania too is under fire from climate critics. As attorney general, he authored a solid road map for protecting Pennsylvanians from the harmful environmental and health effects of fracking, but in his two years as governor he has allowed companies to be secretive about the chemicals used in fracking, and has not pushed to pass any laws curbing the industry. The Environmental Health Project, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, said “residents are still waiting for meaningful action. Our assessment concludes that the Shapiro administration has not fulfilled the commitments the governor made to Pennsylvanians in general and to frontline communities in particular.”And then there’s New York. Governor Kathy Hochul has been failing to follow the decarbonization timeline that was outlined in the state’s 2019 climate law, prompting environmental justice groups to sue her. She has delayed plans for “cap and invest” and is dragging her feet on building public renewables (despite the state’s landmark Build Public Renewables Act, which passed in 2023). She has seemingly caved to Trump by going ahead with gas pipelines she previously rejected. And it’s unclear whether she will sign a repeal of the outdated “100 foot rule,” which requires utility ratepayers to subsize the cost of connecting new customers to the gas system, a reform that has long been a priority of the state’s climate movement.Part of what’s so self-destructive here is that energy affordability is a highly salient issue for voters, taking center stage, for example in the governor’s race in New Jersey, where electricity rates have risen 22 percent. Interviewed in Friday’s New York Times on this subject, David Springe of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates described electricity as “the new eggs,” an indicator of how costly daily life is for most Americans. Republicans in New York have seized on the problem as an opportunity to blame Democrats and climate-friendly policies. Stephan Edel of New York Renews, a progressive coalition fighting for clean energy, told me the governor “has spoken really eloquently about the need to do something about affordability.” Indeed, she endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist, for New York City mayor, partly for this reason. She often uses “affordability” to justify rightward shifts or retreats from climate policy, he said, adding that, inexplicably, she also shies away from touting the affordability benefits of climate policies that she does support. For example, in the state budget last year, she agreed to invest over a billion dollars in funding for climate programs, including one that will help make homes for low-income New Yorkers more energy efficient and another that will save school districts money by shifting to electric school buses. Instead of touting those wins for affordability—or embracing the potential of publicly owned renewables to do the same—she’s embraced the Republican narrative that climate policy and affordability are at odds.By contrast, Mikie Sherill in New Jersey has been touting clean energy as a solution to energy affordability woes. If she gets elected and continues this path, more blue state governors should follow her lead. The Democratic base is desperate to see its leaders stand up to Trump on both climate and affordability. (And when Democratic governors do stand up to Trump on anything—Illinois’s JB Pritzker on the militarization of Chicago, Maine’s Janet Mills on health care—their poll numbers spike.)And the reverse is also true—failing to differentiate themselves from Trump has been political suicide for many Democrats. “Every time one of these elected officials says, ‘I’m going to stand up to Trump, I’m going to protect affordability, I’m going to address climate change,’ and then doesn’t do it,” that’s a win for the Republicans, Edel said, because it fuels low turnout for Democratic voters. Climate offers an obvious opportunity to isolate the Republicans on a matter of broad concern, renew Americans’ faith in government, and make real progress. The Democratic governors flailing so badly on this issue have not only a moral obligation to change course, but also a political one.

If you scroll California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press releases, a portrait emerges of a undaunted climate fighter. One day he’s “paving [the] way for climate pollution-cutting technology”; another he’s launching “new international climate partnerships as Trump unleashes unhinged UN rant.” Last month, he announced the signing of a suite of measures “saving billions on electric bills, stabilizing [the] gas market and cutting pollution.” But look under the hood, and his heroic self-image dims somewhat. That big legislative package, for instance, also increases oil drilling and sets up a regional electricity market that “could tether California to fossil-fuel states at a time when the Trump administration is moving to roll back clean energy,” CalMatters reported.With Trump in death-drive mode on climate, canceling renewable energy projects left and right and even forbidding federal agencies to use language such as “climate change,” “green,”or “sustainable,” blue-state governors are well positioned to distinguish themselves and their party on the issue. They also have a responsibility: The states are our best hope for policy at a scale to match the problem. Yet a worrying trend is taking shape: Blue-state governors are making a big show of battling the Trump administration, but on climate issues they’ve been disappointing—and sometimes downright infuriating. Last month’s climate package wasn’t the California Democrats’ first flub this year. Over the summer, in what Politico dubbed the state’s “Great Climate Retreat,” they weakened limits on the carbon intensity of transportation fuels, rolled back environmental reviews for new housing, and lifted a cap on oil industry profits. “California was the vocal climate leader during the first Trump administration,” Chris Chavez, deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air, told Politico. “It’s questionable whether or not that leadership is still there.” In Maryland, a climate advisory panel appointed by Governor Wes Moore has hit the brakes on a carbon trading measure, and late last month the state Department of the Environment, or MDE, appeared to cave to the Trump administration in abandoning some environmental justice metrics, which many fear means abandoning Black and brown communities to the whims of polluters. “It just appears to me that MDE blatantly does not want to be accountable in the massive pollution and the overburden of these heavy industrial industries,” Kamita Gray, a community leader in Brandywine—a majority-Black town that’s home to gas-fired power plants, a coal ash dump, and a Superfund site—told Maryland Matters.Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania too is under fire from climate critics. As attorney general, he authored a solid road map for protecting Pennsylvanians from the harmful environmental and health effects of fracking, but in his two years as governor he has allowed companies to be secretive about the chemicals used in fracking, and has not pushed to pass any laws curbing the industry. The Environmental Health Project, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, said “residents are still waiting for meaningful action. Our assessment concludes that the Shapiro administration has not fulfilled the commitments the governor made to Pennsylvanians in general and to frontline communities in particular.”And then there’s New York. Governor Kathy Hochul has been failing to follow the decarbonization timeline that was outlined in the state’s 2019 climate law, prompting environmental justice groups to sue her. She has delayed plans for “cap and invest” and is dragging her feet on building public renewables (despite the state’s landmark Build Public Renewables Act, which passed in 2023). She has seemingly caved to Trump by going ahead with gas pipelines she previously rejected. And it’s unclear whether she will sign a repeal of the outdated “100 foot rule,” which requires utility ratepayers to subsize the cost of connecting new customers to the gas system, a reform that has long been a priority of the state’s climate movement.Part of what’s so self-destructive here is that energy affordability is a highly salient issue for voters, taking center stage, for example in the governor’s race in New Jersey, where electricity rates have risen 22 percent. Interviewed in Friday’s New York Times on this subject, David Springe of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates described electricity as “the new eggs,” an indicator of how costly daily life is for most Americans. Republicans in New York have seized on the problem as an opportunity to blame Democrats and climate-friendly policies. Stephan Edel of New York Renews, a progressive coalition fighting for clean energy, told me the governor “has spoken really eloquently about the need to do something about affordability.” Indeed, she endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist, for New York City mayor, partly for this reason. She often uses “affordability” to justify rightward shifts or retreats from climate policy, he said, adding that, inexplicably, she also shies away from touting the affordability benefits of climate policies that she does support. For example, in the state budget last year, she agreed to invest over a billion dollars in funding for climate programs, including one that will help make homes for low-income New Yorkers more energy efficient and another that will save school districts money by shifting to electric school buses. Instead of touting those wins for affordability—or embracing the potential of publicly owned renewables to do the same—she’s embraced the Republican narrative that climate policy and affordability are at odds.By contrast, Mikie Sherill in New Jersey has been touting clean energy as a solution to energy affordability woes. If she gets elected and continues this path, more blue state governors should follow her lead. The Democratic base is desperate to see its leaders stand up to Trump on both climate and affordability. (And when Democratic governors do stand up to Trump on anything—Illinois’s JB Pritzker on the militarization of Chicago, Maine’s Janet Mills on health care—their poll numbers spike.)And the reverse is also true—failing to differentiate themselves from Trump has been political suicide for many Democrats. “Every time one of these elected officials says, ‘I’m going to stand up to Trump, I’m going to protect affordability, I’m going to address climate change,’ and then doesn’t do it,” that’s a win for the Republicans, Edel said, because it fuels low turnout for Democratic voters. Climate offers an obvious opportunity to isolate the Republicans on a matter of broad concern, renew Americans’ faith in government, and make real progress. The Democratic governors flailing so badly on this issue have not only a moral obligation to change course, but also a political one.

Climate
Chemicals
Government

Nations Meet to Consider Regulations to Drive a Green Transition in Shipping

Maritime nations are meeting in London to discuss regulations that could shift the shipping industry away from fossil fuels

The world’s largest maritime nations are gathering in London on Tuesday to consider adopting regulations that would move the shipping industry away from fossil fuels to slash emissions.If the deal is adopted, this will be the first time a global fee is imposed on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Most ships today run on heavy fuel oil that releases carbon dioxide and other pollutants as it’s burned. That would be a major win for the climate, public health, the ocean and marine life, said Delaine McCullough at the Ocean Conservancy. For too long, ships have run on crude, dirty oil, she said.“This agreement provides a lesson for the world that legally-binding climate action is possible," McCullough, shipping program director for the nonprofit environmental advocacy group, said. Shipping emissions have grown over the last decade to about 3% of the global total as trade has grown and vessels use immense amounts of fossil fuels to transport cargo over long distances. The regulations would set a pricing system for gas emissions The regulations, or “Net-zero Framework,” sets a marine fuel standard that decreases, over time, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed from using shipping fuels. The regulations also establish a pricing system that would impose fees for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by ships above allowable limits, in what is effectively the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions.There's a base-level of compliance for the allowable greenhouse gas intensity of fuels. There's a more stringent direct compliance target that requires further reduction in the greenhouse gas intensity.If ships sail on fuels with lower emissions than what's required under the direct compliance target, they earn “surplus units," effectively credits. Ships with the highest emissions would have to buy those credits from other ships under the pricing system, or from the IMO at $380 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent to reach the base level of compliance. In addition, there's a penalty of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent to reach direct compliance. Ships that meet the base target but not the direct compliance one must pay the $100 per ton penalty, too. Ships whose greenhouse gas intensity is below a certain threshold will receive rewards for their performance.The fees could generate $11 billion to $13 billion in revenue annually. That would go into an IMO fund to invest in fuels and technologies needed to transition to green shipping, reward low-emission ships and support developing countries so they aren’t left behind with dirty fuels and old ships. Looking for alternative fuels Ships could lower their emissions by using alternative fuels, running on electricity or using onboard carbon capture technologies. Wind propulsion and other energy efficiency advancements can also help reduce fuel consumption and emissions as part of an energy transition. Large ships last about 25 years, so the industry would need to make changes and investments now to reach net-zero around 2050.If adopted, the regulations will enter into force in 2027. Large oceangoing ships over 5,000 gross tonnage, which emit 85% of the total carbon emissions from international shipping, would have to pay penalties for their emissions starting in 2028, according to the IMO. The International Chamber of Shipping, which represents over 80% of the world’s merchant fleet, is advocating for adoption. Concerns over biofuels produced from food crops Heavy fuel oil, liquefied natural gas and biodiesel will be dominant for most of the 2030s and 2040s, unless the IMO further incentivizes green alternatives, according to modeling from Transport and Environment, a Brussels-based environmental nongovernmental organization. The way the rules are designed essentially make biofuels the cheapest fuel to use to comply, but biofuels require huge amounts of crops, pushing out less profitable food production, often leading to additional land clearance and deforestation, said Faig Abbasov, shipping director at T&E. They are urging the IMO to promote scalable green alternatives, not recklessly promote biofuels produced from food crops, Abbasov said. As it stands now, the deal before the IMO won't deliver net-zero emissions by 2050, he added.Green ammonia will get to a price that it’s appealing to ship owners in the late 2040s — quite late in the transition, according to the modeling. The NGO also sees green methanol playing an important role in the long-term transition. The vote at the London meeting The IMO aims for consensus in decision-making but it's likely nations will vote on adopting the regulations. At the April meeting, a vote was called to approve the contents of the regulations. The United States was notably absent in April, but plans to participate in this meeting. Teresa Bui at Pacific Environment said she's optimistic “global momentum is on our side” and a majority of countries will support adoption. Bui is senior climate campaign director for the environmental nonprofit, which has consultative, or non-voting, status at the IMO. If it fails, shipping’s decarbonization will be further delayed.“It's difficult to know for sure what the precise consequences will be, but failure this week will certainly lead to delay, which means ships will emit more greenhouse gases than they would have done and for longer, continuing their outsized contribution to the climate crisis,” said John Maggs, of the Clean Shipping Coalition, who is at the London meeting. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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For the first time, we linked a new fossil fuel project to hundreds of deaths. Here’s the impact of Woodside’s Scarborough gas project

The results challenge claims that the climate risks posed by an individual fossil fuel project are negligible or cannot be quantified.

Massimo Valicchia/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesGlobal warming from Woodside’s massive Scarborough gas project off Western Australia would lead to 484 additional heat-related deaths in Europe alone this century, and kill about 16 million additional corals on the Great Barrier Reef during each future mass bleaching event, our new research has revealed. The findings were made possible by a robust, well-established formula that can determine the extent to which an individual fossil fuel project will warm the planet. The results can be used to calculate the subsequent harms to society and nature. The results close a fundamental gap between science and decision-making about fossil fuel projects. They also challenge claims by proponents that climate risks posed by a fossil fuel project are negligible or cannot be quantified. Each new investment in coal and gas, such as the Scarborough project, can now be linked to harmful effects both today and in the future. It means decision-makers can properly assess the range of risks a project poses to humanity and the planet, before deciding if it should proceed. Each new investment in coal and gas extraction can now be linked to harmful effects. Shutterstock Every tonne of CO₂ matters Scientists know every tonne of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions makes global warming worse. But proponents of new fossil fuel projects in Australia routinely say their future greenhouse gas emissions are negligible compared to the scale of global emissions, or say the effects of these emissions on global warming can’t be measured. The Scarborough project is approved for development and is expected to produce gas from next year. Located off WA, it includes wells connected by a 430km pipeline to an onshore processing facility. The gas will be liquefied and burned for energy, both in Australia and overseas. Production is expected to last more than 30 years. When natural gas is burned, more than 99% of it converts to CO₂. Woodside – in its own evaluation of the Scarborough gas project – claimed: it is not possible to link GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from Scarborough with climate change or any particular climate-related impacts given the estimated […] emissions associated with Scarborough are negligible in the context of existing and future predicted global GHG concentrations. But what if there was a way to measure the harms? That’s the question our research set out to answer. A method already exists to directly link global emissions to the climate warming they cause. It uses scientific understanding of Earth’s systems, direct observations and climate model simulations. According to the IPCC, every 1,000 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions causes about 0.45°C of additional global warming. This arithmetic forms the basis for calculating how much more CO₂ humanity can emit to keep warming within the Paris Agreement goals. But decisions about future emissions are not made at the global scale. Instead, Earth’s climate trajectory will be determined by the aggregation of decisions on many individual projects. That’s why our research extended the IPCC method to the level of individual projects – an approach that we illustrate using the Scarborough gas project. Scarborough’s harms laid bare Over its lifetime, the Scarborough project is expected to emit 876 million tonnes of CO₂. We estimate these emissions will cause 0.00039°C of additional global warming. Estimates such as these are typically expressed as a range, alongside a measure of confidence in the projection. In this case, there is a 66–100% likelihood that the Scarborough project will cause additional global warming of between 0.00024°C and 0.00055°C. This additional warming might seem small – but it will cause tangible damage. The human cost of global warming can be quantified by considering how many people will be left outside the “human climate niche” – in other words, the climate conditions in which societies have historically thrived. We calculated that the additional warming from the Scarborough project will expose 516,000 people globally to a local climate that’s beyond the hot extreme of the human climate niche. We drilled down into specific impacts in Europe, where suitable health data was available across 854 cities. Our best estimate is that this project would cause an additional 484 heat-related deaths in Europe by the end of this century. The project would cause an additional 484 heat-related deaths in Europe by the end of this century. Antonio Masiello/Getty Images And what about harm to nature? Using research into how accumulated exposure to heat affects coral reefs, we found about 16 million corals on the Great Barrier Reef would be lost in each new mass bleaching. The existential threat to the Great Barrier Reef from human-caused global warming is already being realised. Additional warming instigated by new fossil fuel projects will ratchet up pressure on this natural wonder. As climate change worsens, countries are seeking to slash emissions to meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement. So, we looked at the impact of Scarborough’s emissions on Australia’s climate targets. We calculated that by 2049, the anticipated emissions from the Scarborough project alone – from production, processing and domestic use – will comprise 49% of Australia’s entire annual CO₂ emissions budget under our commitment to net-zero by 2050. Beyond the 2050 deadline, all emissions from the Scarborough project would require technologies to permanently remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Achieving that would require a massive scale-up of current technologies. It would be more prudent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where possible. ‘Negligible’ impacts? Hardly Our findings mean the best-available scientific evidence can now be used by companies, governments and regulators when deciding if a fossil fuel project will proceed. Crucially, it is no longer defensible for companies proposing new or extended fossil fuel projects to claim the climate harms will be negligible. Our research shows the harms are, in fact, tangible and quantifiable – and no project is too small to matter. In response to issues raised in this article, a spokesperson for Woodside said: Woodside is committed to playing a role in the energy transition. The Scarborough reservoir contains less than 0.1% carbon dioxide. Combined with processing design efficiencies at the offshore floating production unit and onshore Pluto Train 2, the project is expected to be one of the lowest carbon intensity sources of LNG delivered into north Asian markets. We will reduce the Scarborough Energy Project’s direct greenhouse gas emissions to as low as reasonably practicable by incorporating energy efficiency measures in design and operations. Further information on how this is being achieved is included in the Scarborough Offshore Project Proposal, sections 4.5.4.1 and 7.1.3 and in approved Australian Government environment plans, available on the regulator’s website. A report prepared by consultancy ACIL Allen has found that Woodside’s Scarborough Energy Project is expected to generate an estimated A$52.8 billion in taxation and royalty payments, boost GDP by billions of dollars between 2024 and 2056 and employ 3,200 people during peak construction in Western Australia. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research CouncilAndrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship and Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather) and the National Environmental Science Program. Nicola Maher receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Wesley Morgan is a fellow with the Climate Council of Australia

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Emissions linked to Woodside’s Scarborough gas project could lead to at least 480 deaths, research suggests

Scientists have examined the $16.5bn project’s climate impact and found it could expose more than half a million people to unprecedented heatSign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter hereGreenhouse emissions linked to a gas field being developed by Australian fossil fuel company Woodside could lead to the death of at least 480 people and expose more than half a million to unprecedented heat, new research suggests.Scientists from six universities have examined the climate impact of the $16.5bn Scarborough project, which is expected to start production off the northern Western Australian coast next year and could result in 876m tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere over three decades. Continue reading...

Greenhouse emissions linked to a gas field being developed by Australian fossil fuel company Woodside could lead to the death of at least 480 people and expose more than half a million to unprecedented heat, new research suggests.Scientists from six universities have examined the climate impact of the $16.5bn Scarborough project, which is expected to start production off the northern Western Australian coast next year and could result in 876m tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere over three decades.Emissions from the project would contribute 0.00039C to global heating, they estimate. Using recently developed techniques known as climate attribution, they suggest that fraction of warming would expose an additional 516,000 people globally to unprecedented heat, and result in the loss of an extra 16m coral colonies in the Great Barrier Reef in every future bleaching event.It would also push 356,000 people outside the “human climate niche” – the reasonable zone for human survival, with an upper limit for average annual temperature of 29C.The study, published in the journal Climate Action, forms part of a new focus in climate science that aims to quantify the impacts of individual fossil fuel projects and emitters.A Woodside spokesperson said the company would reduce the Scarborough project’s “direct greenhouse gas emissions to as low as reasonably practicable by incorporating energy efficiency measures in design and operations”.“Climate change is caused by the net global concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” they added. “It cannot be attributed to any one event, country, industry or activity.” Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletterBut study co-author Andrew King, an associate professor in climate science at the University of Melbourne, said the research illustrated that individual projects had tangible climate impacts.“Often the argument made for individual projects that would involve greenhouse gas emissions is that they are quite small [in the global context],” he said. “But really, especially with larger fossil fuel projects, we can very clearly say that the impacts are not negligible.”Study co-author Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a professor of climate science at the Australian National University, said that given Australia’s emission reductions requirements, in the coming decades Scarborough would also constitute a greater proportion of the country’s CO2 emissions budget.“By 2049, assuming that the Scarborough project emits the same amount year on year, it’s going to be chewing up half of our emissions budget,” Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. “That’s the stuff that we burn here, let alone what we export overseas.”Beyond 2050, emissions from Scarborough would require CO2 removal from the atmosphere – “technologies that either don’t exist yet, or that we can’t scale up”, she said.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Clear Air AustraliaAdam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisisPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionUnder a middle-of-the-road emissions scenario, warming contributed by Scarborough would cause an additional 484 heat-related deaths in Europe alone by the end of the century, the researchers calculated. Taking into account a reduction in cold-related deaths in Europe, they estimate a net contribution of 118 additional deaths.The researchers calculated the project’s climate impacts with a tool used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called the Transient Climate Response to CO2 Emissions (TCRE). The TCRE estimates that every 1,000 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions causes 0.45C of additional global heating.Scarborough’s contribution to global heating had a likely range between 0.00024C and 0.00055C, the study’s authors estimated, but they noted “direct measurement of global mean temperature changes is not possible with this level of precision”.The approach could be used by governments and companies to assess whether future “projects fall within acceptable levels of environmental and societal risk”, the researchers suggest. The tool “could be part of the process for determining whether a project should be approved”, King said.Yuming Guo, a professor of global environmental health and biostatistics at Monash University, who was not involved in the study, said the study provided “a valuable tool for conducting environmental risk assessments”.“Considering the vast number of fossil fuel projects operating globally, the cumulative contribution of these emissions to climate change is substantial and should not be overlooked,” he said.Dr Kat O’Mara, a senior lecturer in environmental management and sustainability at Edith Cowan University, who was not part of the study, said: “With the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion a few months ago that countries need to take action to protect the climate, this new research reinforces the need to consider climate impacts beyond just how much carbon is being produced.”

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Voices of Transition

Voices of Transition is an enthusiastic documentary on farmer- and community-led responses to food insecurity in a scenario of climate change, peak oil, and economic crisis. Concrete examples from Cuba, France, and the United Kingdom tell of a future society where our monoculture deserts will be restored to living soil, where fields will be introduced into our cities, and where independence from oil will help us live a richer, more fulfilling life.

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Climate

We Trees

Ever wonder what trees think of us now that we have created a climate disaster? This 2-minute film answers that question. As Bill McKibben recently tweeted about the film, “Who speaks for trees? In this short and elegant video, the trees themselves.” It has been screened at Green Fest (Serbia), The Colorado Environmental Film Festival, The Wildlife Conservation Film Festival and Winner of Merit at the Nature Without Borders Film Festival.

Forests
Chemicals
Climate

THE SPRAYER

In the land occupied with the sprayers army, no one has the right to grow any kind of plants either in public or private. So many of the people and soldiers do not even know how a plant grows or looks like, until one day one of the soldiers finds a seed buried deep down in the dust and his curiosity is just the beginning of something extraordinary, something big, something revolutionary.

Plants
CO2
Animation

Total Disaster

Armed with realistic bird puppets, trickster environmental activists pretend to be oil company Total—staging a satirical press conference to introduce "RéHabitat," a program to rescue animals from the East African Oil Pipeline by relocating them to “more sustainable” habitats. Using humor and mischief, they expose a deadly ecological disaster in a zany effort to help #StopEACOP.

Activism
Energy
Animals

Uncovering the Permian Climate Bomb

The fossil fuel industry is building a global threat in the oil fields of West Texas. Miguel Escoto, who has lived close to this region his whole life, witnesses the industry’s villainy for the first time by viewing oil and gas site emissions through optical gas imaging cameras, becoming a stand-in for a world that has yet to grasp the gravity of the Permian Climate Bomb.

Pollution
Activism
Climate

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