It is expected that the warming of the Earth's climate will change the habitat of many species of animals, which will lead to the exchange of viruses between them and outbreaks of new diseases in both animals and humans..

These are the findings of a modeling team led by Colin Carlson, a global change biologist at Georgetown University (Washington, DC, USA). The study report was published April 29 in the journal Nature in the article "

A model built by a team of researchers predicts that migratory species due to climate change will mix with many others they have never come into contact with, leading to virus exchanges.. This could trigger new disease outbreaks in various wildlife populations as well as humans..

Under the most conservative warming scenario, there will be at least 15,000 new interspecies virus transmissions by 2070 involving more than 3,000 mammal species, the model predicts..

According to Colin Carlson, this model began to materialize with a 1°C increase in global temperature, which has already occurred.. However, according to him, “most species on Earth have not yet met each other.”. Scientists try to predict what will happen next.

The author of the article writes that some of the findings of the study surprised him.. In particular, it is bats, which make up about 20% of all mammals, that will have a huge impact on the transmission of viruses due to their ability to fly..

In his opinion, Carlson, the movement of species and their interaction will occur not only to higher latitudes of the north and south of the planet, but also from the valleys to the highlands of Asia and Africa..

For a specific example, the team conducted a study on the migration of the Ebola virus in Zaire, which they predict has 13 possible host mammals.. Scientists have calculated that the least dramatic scenario of climate change could see the virus involved in more than 2,000 collisions between two animal species, of which nearly 100 could result in the virus passing from one species to another.. This may lead to the extinction of some of these species, and, in addition, to the infection of Ebola in the Horn of Africa in East Africa, where this disease has not been observed before..

Carlson says that while there is no way to rule out the mixing of species that is caused by climate change, he believes we can reduce the risks to humans.. In particular, threats from wildlife markets and deforestation, which increase the frequency of contact between humans and mammals, should be eliminated to prevent pandemics..

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Recall that pneumonia caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic coronavirus was recorded at the end of December 2019 in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.. The most reliable version of the pandemic is the transmission of coronavirus from a bat to a person in a market where wild animals are traded..