New research from the University of Victoria demonstrates how marine heatwaves can dramatically impact marine ecosystems and offers a stark preview of how future ocean warming will reshape ocean life.

The roadmap heralds a significant increase in publicly accessible compute capacity. Investments include up to £2 billion to deliver a holistic and user-centred compute ecosystem with  £1 billion to expand the AI Research Resource 20-fold by 2030.

 

Tropical cyclones in Madagascar lead to sharp spikes in malaria infections – particularly in children – due to interruptions in control efforts, according to a new study. However, the findings show that newly introduced long-lasting vaccines can help to mitigate these gaps. This points to pathways to climate-resilient control strategies in malaria-prone regions. Malaria, already a persistent global health challenge, poses new threats from climate change, not only through rising temperatures that shift mosquito dynamics but also via extreme weather events like tropical cyclones. Such disasters can severely disrupt public health infrastructure, limit access to malaria prevention and treatment, and increase infection risk, especially in high-burden regions where continuity of care and malaria control is critical. However, despite concerns, data on how climate-related disruptions affect malaria control remain scarce. Madagascar – a country with a high malaria burden – is increasingly exposed to the effects of climate change, particularly through the growing frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones, which have repeatedly triggered severe damage to healthcare infrastructure.

 

Using a longitudinal cohort study of 500 households in Madagascar’s Mananjary district, Benjamin Rice and colleagues analyzed 20,718 observations of malaria infection before and after cyclones Batsirai (2022) and Freddy (2023). This allowed the authors to evaluate how well various malaria interventions performed given the strain of extreme weather events. According to the findings, tropical cyclones in Madagascar significantly elevate the risk of malaria infection and reinfection by disrupting essential public health interventions, including malaria prevention and treatment programs. In the months following cyclones, malaria infection surged, particularly in children: up to half of school-age children and over a third of younger children were infected in high-transmission areas. By modeling various control strategies, the authors found that the recently introduced malaria vaccines, which offer up to 10 months of protection, could significantly reduce symptomatic infections and help sustain malaria infection control during climate-related intervention gaps. Despite this, Rice et al. note that malaria vaccines alone are insufficient to stop transmission, adding that layered strategies combining vaccines, drug-based prevention, and traditional tools like bed nets are essential, especially in high-transmission areas where malaria remains persistent.

Heat waves that already affect the population of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB) could significantly intensify in the future, with temperature increases of up to 6ºC and a general reduction in relative humidity in cities by the end of the century. This is shown in a study carried out by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which warns of an increase in average maximum temperatures of 4ºC and average minimum temperatures of 3.5ºC if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced. Temperatures could reach values above 45ºC in urban inland areas of the AMB and above 42ºC in interior areas of the city of Barcelona. 

In an opinion piece published July 16 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate, Jeremy Jacobs of Vanderbilt University and Shazia Khan of Yale School of Medicine draw attention to the rollback of government efforts to collect data on climate change, and how the loss of this infrastructure imperils public health efforts.