1981–2019 Vegetation Health Trends Assessing Malaria Conditions During Intensive Global Warming

Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Earth’s climate has been warming up. In the past 60-year, Earth warmed up intensively, leading to never before experienced environmental, economic and social events. One of the biggest climate warming concerns is how these changes have affected malaria and what to expect in the near and distant future, considering continuation of climate warming and an intensive population growth. In the recent decades, the United Nations’ (WMO, UNEP) climate change actions, IPCC reports and other scientific publications have strongly emphasized that CO2 increase was “very likely” triggering global warming, which has already led to negative consequences for the environment and society. The past 50 years of environmental observations showed global changes in snow and ice areas, sea level, natural disasters, biological systems (plants, birds etc.) and others. Many publications indicated that climate warming has negatively affected crop yield, especially in underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Unfortunately, there are only limited number of publications covering malaria response to global warming. Since climate warming is anticipated drought intensification malaria might be reduced in some areas. If climate warming creates favourable conditions (warm and wet) for mosquitoes’ activities, it might increase the number of people affected by malaria. Since some things are not known, therefore it would be interesting to investigate: What to expect in the future? Which regions will be affected by high malaria? Will the number of people affected by malaria be reduced or increased? Which regions/countries would continue to suffer from the disease? It is also important to understand if short-term (17–35 years) different climate tendencies would continue, considering that before 1998 global warming was very intensive, but between 1998–2014 (hiatus time) the global mean temperature anomaly (TA) experienced a flat trend and that in the last four years (2015–2018) the global mean TA was much warmer than normal. This chapter discusses the current climate warming views, emphasizing matching upward trends in global CO2 and a general warming trend in global mean TA. It also indicates that there are some mismatches between TA and CO2 trends and discusses other causes for temperature warm up. Moreover, this chapter is analysing 1981–2019 vegetation health conditions from remote sensing data and how to use then for assessing malaria area and intensity. These observations were used for trend analysis in global, continental and countries malaria endemic area. Nearly 40-year of remote-sensing high-resolution data were used to investigate vegetation greenness from satellite-based specially processed NDVI and Brightness temperature. Malaria endemic area was also investigated by the moisture (VCI) thermal (TCI) and Vegetation Health (VHI) indices. These indices were used to analyse stressed and healthy vegetation tendencies as identifiers of favourable and unfavourable conditions for mosquitoes’ activity in spreading malaria. 38-39 years investigations covered the global and continental malaria endemic area, and also areas of the most malaria-affected countries. Based on these trends the current and future malaria tendencies were assessed.