ICTP Leading New Wellcome-Funded Anti-Malaria Initiative

A new research consortium led by ICTP has launched to help improve guidance in public health responses to malaria control. The project aims to address a key question concerning the attribution of climate change in health, namely to determine how much long-term changes in climate have helped or hindered the efforts of national malaria control programs to reduce or eliminate malaria transmission rates in Africa.

Funded by a major grant from Wellcome, the project—titled ACCLIMATISE (Attribution of a Changing CLIMate in the AssessmenT of malaria Intervention Strategy Effectiveness)—thus aims to allow governments to better assess the effectiveness of their disease control strategies in a warming world.

The Challenge

Over the last two decades, billions of dollars have been invested in malaria interventions, such as insecticide-treated nets and antimalarial drugs. While the global burden of malaria has decreased, progress has stalled in some regions. A critical blind spot remains: climate variability and long term trends. Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns impact  mosquito breeding cycles. A drop in malaria cases might be celebrated as a policy success when it was actually partially caused by drought. Conversely, a spike in cases might be blamed on policy failure when it was actually driven by an unusually wet, warm season.

"Climate is a key confounder in public health," said Dr. Adrian Tompkins, Principal Investigator and Research Scientist at ICTP. "A country needs to know how well their intervention strategies are working. If malaria cases fall, they need to know if their investment in bed nets caused that, or if changes in climate was hindering, or even in some locations helping, that progress. ACCLIMATISE aims to develop and provide  policymakers the tools to distinguish the signal from the noise, ensuring that limited health budgets are spent on strategies most effectively, regardless of the climate regime and tendency," he stated.

Felipe J Colón-González, Technology Lead at Wellcome, added, "Climate change is influencing when and where malaria spreads, but until now we have lacked the tools to clearly attribute how much of that change is driven by climate change itself. ACCLIMATISE uses advanced modelling methods to separate climate impacts from the effects of malaria interventions. That insight is crucial. It equips health ministries with evidence they can trust to evaluate their programmes, anticipate risks and plan more resilient strategies as the climate continues to change.

He concluded, "This is the kind of digital innovation we need to strengthen health systems and protect the communities most affected by the climate crisis.”

ACCLIMATISE

ACCLIMATISE will deploy leading modelling systems to attribute climate trends on malaria, integrating high-resolution climate monitoring and projections, including new observation networks in Senegal and state-of-the-art, kilometer-scale climate model projections as well as Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) collections of climate model simulations from many different research centers worldwide, together with epidemiological data on malaria case rates and intervention coverage into a multi-model approach to malaria simulation.  The team will be able to run "counterfactual" simulations—effectively rewinding history to see what malaria rates would have looked like without climate change, or without specific interventions.

The three-year initiative involves a consortium of eight institutions across Africa, Europe, and the USA. The research will focus initially on three African nations -- Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal -- working directly with health ministries to co-design tools using advanced AI emulators that can be used for better assessment of past interventions, and thus more effective future, malaria intervention planning accounting for climate variability and trends.  It is funded by Wellcome as part of their recent ATTRIVERSE call focusing on the attribution of climate change in health outcomes.

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