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Malaria Cases Are Spiking on a Warmer, Wetter World

The malaria-climate change connection, explained

Flooding in Pakistan.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The World Health Organization’s annual malaria report, released Thursday, for the first time includes a chapter “focused on the intersection between climate change and malaria” — and finds that climate change was a factor in a global increase in the disease. There were an estimated 249 million malaria cases in 2022, a five million increase over the previous year. Most of the new cases were concentrated in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Uganda.

The reasons for the surge seem to be manifold. Across sub-saharan Africa, the Anopheles mosquito, which transmits the disease, is expanding its range as the region warms. Flooding can also leave behind stagnant pools of standing water, which leads to a boom in mosquito numbers, as followed Pakistan’s catastrophic floods in 2022. And as people are displaced by such disasters, those without malarial immunity may settle in areas prone to the disease. In many cases they also live in tents or refugee centers, without simple yet crucial protections such as mosquito nets.

As is so often the case with climate change, the problems are at once immense — increasing heat in Subsaharan Africa and South Asia — and practical — not enough nets. “It is crucial to recognize the multitude of threats that impede our response efforts,” said Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization’s Regional Director for Africa. “Climate variability poses a substantial risk, but we must also contend with challenges such as limited healthcare access, [and] ongoing conflicts and emergencies ... we need a concerted effort to tackle these diverse threats.”

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Sparks

Major Renewables Nonprofit Cuts a Third of Staff After Trump Slashes Funding

The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.

The DOE wrecking ball.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.

IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)

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Sparks

Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

Donald Trump, Doug Burgum, and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.

Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.

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Sparks

Trump Just Suffered His First Loss on Offshore Wind

A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.

Donald Trump and wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.

The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”

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