For years with respect to climate policy, I have argued that adaptation needs to be treated as a complement to mitigation. Yet often the mere mention of adaptation is enough to get mitigation advocates in a tizzy, simply because you are talking about climate policy but not about carbon. A good example of this myopia can be found in an article last week in the FT by Fiona Harvey on malaria, as part of a special section on World Malaria Day. The article explains that malaria is not primarily an issue of human caused climate change:

But contrary to what many people expect, the spread of malaria is not a simple result of warmer climates. Until recently, forms of malaria were to be found in many areas – from Russia to the UK – that were far from hot. Some of these forms were less virulent than the forms prevalent in the tropics, but were nevertheless problematic.

Malaria was eradicated from those areas in a variety of ways, most recently by concentrated human health programmes centred on the use of insecticides, but also by changes in human behaviour and increasing prosperity – the draining of wetlands and better sanitation, for instance.

Kevin Lafferty, of the US Geological Survey, argues – also in Ecology – that the newly suitable areas for diseases such as malaria will tend to be in more affluent regions where medicines are in widespread use and can more readily combat the problem. He cites model estimations that the most dangerous kind of malaria will gain 23m human hosts outside of its current range by the year 2050, but will lose 25m hosts in its current range. The recent history of malarial eradication in some prosperous areas provides evidence for this, he says. “The dramatic contraction of malaria during a century of warming suggests that economic forces might be just as important as climate in determining pathogen ranges,” Mr Lafferty says.

“If we over-emphasise the role of climate at the expense of other factors that drive disease dynamics, we may be missing the forest for the trees.”

Then, perhaps out of concern that while reading this heresy we may have forgotten the importance of mitigation policies, Harvey reminds us to keep our focus with the following kludge of an analogy:

If that view is correct, there is no inevitability about the spread of malaria as the result of a warming climate – just as there is no inevitability that the worst effects of global warming will be felt if we can cut greenhouse gas emissions immediately.

Apparently not even malaria is allowed to have its own day.