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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

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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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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Interior Department Targets Wind Developers Using Bird Protection Law

A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

An eagle clutching a wind turbine.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.

The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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