Climate change is likely to alter the burden of infectious diseases. Yet, attributing health impacts to a changing climate will require a step change in both disease surveillance and health impact data, as well as the computational tools we use to interpret them.

Methods to establish the influence of climate and weather lay the ground for predicting future burdens of directly transmitted infections; while rich data allows us to probe the impact of disruptions to control efforts of malaria by extreme events such as cyclones. The buffering effects of immunity and vaccination emerge repeatedly as important factors in managing and predicting the burden of infection, underscoring the importance of a global immunological observatory.

This event was organised by the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics.