Models, mosquitoes and the power to adapt

When it comes to climate change, why are mosquitoes afforded a more active role than people in our visions of the future? This sounds far-fetched, but in climate impacts studies the capacity of mosquitoes to adapt to changing climates has been increasingly accepted, but the same cannot often be said for the adaptive capacity of human beings. What does this say about how we use climate models in decision-making?


As part of my data-gathering in India I’ve been looking into how projections of future climate change are being made and how they are being applied to decision making processes. One of the key areas of concern for Indian scientists and policymakers is the possible impact of climate change on human health, particularly through changes in the prevalence of vector-borne diseases such as malaria.

Fumigation in an urban area. Source: trendsupdates.com

It’s been interesting to look into the methodologies used for predicting future malaria patterns. In the recent ‘4x4 Assessment’ produced by the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment (INCCA), it was reported that there is a likelihood that the spatial extent of malaria may increase slightly by the 2030s, with states like Jammu and Kashmir experiencing new outbreaks. Other states which already play host to malaria-bearing mosquitoes may see the annual ‘transmission window’ lengthen. However, it is acknowledged that making predictions about malarial risks decades into the future is a very difficult task.

For the INCCA assessment, transmission windows were calculated by looking at changes in average temperatures and levels of relative humidity, as projected by a regional climate model. However, mosquitoes of course do not have much interest in meteorological averages. It’s therefore acknowledged that the predictions are undermined by the propensity of mosquitoes to seek out ‘micro-niches’, i.e. spaces where they can enjoy their favoured climatic conditions even when the average temperature or humidity isn’t to their liking. This might mean that they can be found around standing water when relative humidity levels are low, or sheltering inside buildings when summer temperatures are too high.

Source: Wired

The acknowledgement of this behaviour struck me as being quite interesting in the context of our dominant modes of thought concerning climate adaptation. In some ways, the mosquitoes are showing a high level of adaptive capacity to rising temperatures, and our knowledge of this means that they are afforded a high level of what might be termed ‘adaptive agency’ in our attempts to visualize the future. In the epistemic chain fashioned between model projections of rising temperatures and visions of impacts on human systems, mosquitoes are afforded an active role in seeking out favourable physical conditions for their existence, below the level of crude statistics on which so much adaptation thinking operates.

This kind of adaptive agency is often not afforded to humans when it comes to thinking about climate impacts. As Mike Hulme has argued in a recent paper, our dominant approach to thinking about the impacts of climate change has placed humans at the end of a reductionist causal chain and eradicated human agency. He attributes this epistemic phenomenon to the ‘hegemony’ of climate models in political and social debate:

These models and calculations allow for little human agency, little recognition of evolving, adapting and innovating societies, and little attempt to consider the changing values, cultures and practices of humanity. The contingencies of the future are whitewashed out of the future. Humans are depicted as “dumb farmers”, passively awaiting their climate fate. The possibilities of human agency are relegated to footnotes, the changing cultural norms and practices made invisible, the creative potential of the human imagination ignored.

For the discourse of ‘climate impacts’ to have internal consistency and immediate political bite, humans must necessarily be positioned as the inert targets of cascading calculations of rising temperatures, changing environments, and strained economic systems. I agree with Mike Hulme that this is a deleterious strategy which not only provides little insight on what future human societies will look like, but which also contains within it an assumption about how adaptation should be managed: top-down re-alignment of social systems so that they may absorb the shocks of changing external, determinant conditions.

What needs to be recognised is that human societies will adapt to changing circumstances in unpredictable, innovative and diverse ways. Much like the wily mosquitoes and their contempt for climatic averages, communities are already adapting to changing environments without any reference to what the mean regional temperature might be 30 or 40 years hence. Such predictions may be useful for identifying where new stresses might arise, but the capacity to deal with those stresses lies at the level of individuals, communities and institutions, and these must be supported in generating resilience by making space for flexible, reflexive decision making.

Human culture can be thought of as a form of order which is in a constant process of emergence from a state of disorder. This emergence means the continual seeking of new ‘micro-niches’ in which individuals can flourish culturally, socially, economically, spiritually. Holistically accounting for these processes – not to mention predicting them – is impossible. But recognising this great source of uncertainty (arguably a greater source than the behaviour of the climate system under anthropogenic forcing) will go a long way towards re-structuring our epistemic approach to adaptation. Like mosquitoes, future humans will not be ‘known’ at the resolution of a climate prediction.