Original title: Climate change and human mobility will shape dengue emergence risk in Europe
Charley Presigny, Paolo Baglioni, Pietro Rotondo, Michele Allegra +2 · August 2026
Europe has not historically been home to dengue, a virus spread by mosquitoes. However, arbovirusA virus that is spread by insects like mosquitoes or ticks. outbreaks have multiplied there in recent decades, and climate change could make local outbreaks worse. To understand this danger, researchers built a model that tracks how dengue can emerge and spread across Europe throughout the 21st century. The model combines how the virus transmits, how many mosquito vectors are present, and how humans, mosquitoes, and airplanes move around. It also uses a migration model to see how climate-driven shifts in human populations might change the danger. The researchers found that dengue emergence risk increases substantially under most emissions scenarios, assuming climate avoids major tipping points. While travel importation will still drive most risk, conditions will gradually transition toward an environment-driven regime, especially under the worst-case emissions scenario.
Imagine you live in a cold city that has never had cockroaches. Now the winters are getting warmer, and some cockroach eggs might survive. You want to know where they could show up next, so you track how many people travel from places that already have cockroaches, because they might carry eggs in their luggage. But you also know that if the city gets hotter, people might move to cooler areas, changing where the risk is. In this paper, the researchers built a model that combines temperature changes, travel patterns, and migration to predict where mosquito-borne diseases like dengue might appear in Europe as the climate changes.
Europe has never had dengue as a local problem, but climate change could make parts of it warm enough for the mosquitoes that carry the virus to survive and spread it. This matters because health systems need to know which cities and regions might face outbreaks decades from now, and whether migration driven by climate change could shift the risks.
The abstract does not specify model validation against real outbreak data, so the predictive accuracy remains untested. It also assumes no major climate tipping points and does not account for potential mitigation measures like mosquito control, vaccines, or public health interventions that could alter risk.
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Climate change and human mobility will shape dengue emergence risk in Europe — Charley Presigny, Paolo Baglioni, Pietro Rotondo et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.