Climate Change Influences the Spread of African Swine Fever Virus

Shraddha Tiwari; Thakur Dhakal; Tae-Su Kim; Do-Hun Lee; Gab-Sue Jang; Yeonsu Oh

doi:10.3390/vetsci9110606

Climate Change Influences the Spread of African Swine Fever Virus

Vet Sci. 2022 Nov 1;9(11):606. doi: 10.3390/vetsci9110606.

Authors

Shraddha Tiwari¹, Thakur Dhakal², Tae-Su Kim², Do-Hun Lee³, Gab-Sue Jang², Yeonsu Oh¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Veterinary Pathology, College of Veterinary Medicine and Institute of Veterinary Science, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon 24341, Korea.
² Department of Life Science, Yeungnam University, Daegu 38541, Korea.
³ National Institute of Ecology (NIE), Seocheon 33657, Korea.

Abstract

Climate change is an inevitable and urgent issue in the current world. African swine fever virus (ASFV) is a re-emerging viral animal disease. This study investigates the quantitative association between climate change and the potential spread of ASFV to a global extent. ASFV in wild boar outbreak locations recorded from 1 January 2019 to 29 July 2022 were sampled and investigated using the ecological distribution tool, the Maxent model, with WorldClim bioclimatic data as the predictor variables. The future impacts of climate change on ASFV distribution based on the model were scoped with Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5) scenarios of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) bioclimatic data for 2050 and 2070. The results show that precipitation of the driest month (Bio14) was the highest contributor, and annual mean temperature (Bio1) was obtained as the highest permutation importance variable on the spread of ASFV. Based on the analyzed scenarios, we found that the future climate is favourable for ASFV disease; only quantitative ratios are different and directly associated with climate change. The current study could be a reference material for wildlife health management, climate change issues, and World Health Organization sustainability goal 13: climate action.

Keywords: ASFV; Maxent; disease; management; wildlife.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Korea Institute of Planning and Evaluation for Technology in Food, Agriculture and Forestry (IPET) through the Animal Disease Management Technology Advancement Support Program, funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (MAFRA) (Project No. 122013-2), and by Yeungnam University research grant, 2019.