Infectious disease ecology and evolution in a changing world

Managing the consequences of climate change and human activity is one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. Extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and droughts, are becoming more common and more severe, and urban and agricultural expansion is contributing to the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems. This new reality challenges the capacity of host species to persist and forces infectious diseases to rapidly evolve. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized how quickly infectious diseases can evolve and spread—with consequences for transmission, virulence and evasion of host defences—and that disease dynamics will play out differently across regions of the globe.