Shifting Burdens of Malaria in a Hotter Africa: A Framework for Planning and Intervention

Climate- and weather-related risks pose threats to human health, especially to the world’s most vulnerable populations. Given competing demands for limited financial resources, new tools and methods are needed to help prioritize responses to address these risks.

At the May Adaptation Community meeting, Dr. Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer in the Department of Geography and the Emerging Pathogens Institute of the University of Florida, will discuss the state of our understanding and modelling of climate and malaria risks. She will also present the results from her research on shifting malaria burdens in a hotter Africa, work that was conducted under the Adaptation Thought Leadership and Assessments Project (ATLAS). This research illustrates that the spread in malaria and its impacts on human lives may shift under rising temperatures. Dr. Ryan will discuss how her research improves our understanding of how malaria seasonality will change across the African continent, with important implications for how and where to program malaria interventions at different temporal and spatial scales.

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Moderator:

Dr. Tegan Blaine is the Senior Climate Change Advisor and Climate Change Team Leader in USAID’s Bureau for Africa where she provides strategic thinking and technical analysis on climate change climate change programs and climate risk management for the Africa region. Prior to USAID, she worked on climate change and international development at McKinsey & Company, as a policy advisor on water at the U.S. Department of State. Dr. Blaine has a Ph.D. in oceanography and climate from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and an A.B./Sc.B. in comparative literature and mathematical ecology from Brown University. She taught secondary math and physics as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania.

Speaker:

Dr. Sadie J. Ryan is an Associate Professor of Medical Geography in the Department of Geography and in the Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI) at the University of Florida, and Principal Investigator of the Quantitative Disease Ecology and Conservation (QDEC) Lab group (www.sadieryan.net). QDEC Lab is home to multiple projects in ecology at the human interface, spanning socioecological systems of vector borne and environmental disease ecology, climate-health modeling, insecticide resistance, and wildlife conservation, from Florida to the Old and New World tropics. Dr. Ryan holds a bachelor’s in ecology and evolutionary biology with an emphasis on conservation biology, quantitative ecology and disease ecology from Princeton University. She holds a PhD from University of California Berkeley where she researched on African buffalo spatial ecology, in their savanna environment, in the context of an epidemic of Bovine Tuberculosis. Her postdoctoral work in anthropological science, ecology and geography, launched her interdisciplinary work looking at the anthropogenic impacts of land use change, climate change, and conservation management goals in African parks landscapes, and the role of socioecological systems in disease transmission in Africa and Latin America.

This event is part of the monthly USAID Adaptation Community Meetings. For more information and to stay up-to-date on similar events, sign up to receive event updates.