Climate change is expected to have complex effects on infectious diseases, causing some to increase, others to decrease, and many to shift their distributions. There have been several important advances in understanding the role of climate and climate change on wildlife and human infectious disease dynamics over the past several years. This essay examines 3 major areas of advancement, which include improvements to mechanistic disease models, investigations into the importance of climate variability to disease dynamics, and understanding the consequences of thermal mismatches between host and parasites. Applying the new information derived from these advances to climate–disease models and addressing the pressing knowledge gaps that we identify should improve the capacity to predict how climate change will affect disease risk for both wildlife and humans.

预计气候变化将对传染病产生复杂的影响，从而导致某些疾病的增加，其他疾病的减少以及许多疾病的分布发生变化。在过去的几年中，在了解气候和气候变化对野生动植物和人类传染病动态的作用方面取得了一些重要进展。本文研究了3个主要方面的进展，其中包括对机械性疾病模型的改进，对气候变异性对疾病动力学的重要性的调查以及对宿主与寄生虫之间热失配的后果的了解。