Global Risks of Infectious Disease Outbreaks and its Relation to Climate

The paper examines whether the aggregated effects of climate change and modes of climate variability affect the propensity for infectious disease outbreaks through an extreme value statistics approach. The analysis reveals that fatalities from outbreaks follow a power-law distribution, indicating that extreme events like the COVID-19 pandemic fall within expected statistical bounds. The authors find that a global linear trend best explains the increasing propensity for large outbreaks, suggesting that socio-economic factors are the dominant drivers. However, in South America, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation emerges as the most relevant covariate, pointing to a regional climate influence on outbreak dynamics.