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Abstract

Despite all the efforts that countries in SSA have made to eliminate the disease in collaboration with other countries, as well as advancements in controlling and curing it, the disease still poses a health challenge in the region. According to different reports, the incidence of the disease increased in the entire world in the years 2020 and 2021, reaching 241 million in the year 2020 from 227 million in the year 2019, indicating that over 200 million instances of the disease were reported in the SSA region alone, resulting in a total of 403,000 deaths, mostly among children below the age of five (WHO, 2021). While the health sector's restrictions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic are attributed to rising disease cases, everyone agrees that the leading cause of the increase in disease incidence in the region is the global warming phenomenon. Rising temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns, increased humidity, and the frequency of extreme weather events have created conducive breeding environments for mosquitoes, facilitating the development of malaria parasites and expanding transmission zones and seasons (IPCC, 2022; Caminade et al., 2019). However, there is limited, dispersed, and bounded empirical evidence documenting the long-run relationship between climate change and malaria incidence in SSA regions, as most studies are based on specific areas, creating uncertainty for the formulation of climate-responsive malaria policy options. Thus, this research aims to investigate the effects of climate change on malaria incidence in SSA using panel data from 2010 to 2024.

The study employed the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) for the data estimation. The findings revealed statistically significant positive coefficients for climate, pneumonia, and GDP per capita, indicating that malaria incidence increases with climate change. The results also suggest that food insecurity does not significantly affect malaria prevalence. The study recommends incorporating climate-related factors into malaria control and prevention strategies. Monitoring weather patterns, identifying high-risk areas based on climatic conditions, and implementing targeted interventions to reduce mosquito breeding and malaria transmission should be accorded the utmost priority.