Climate change and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are two of the greatest threats of our times. Climate change is rapidly emerging as a key driver of AMR and shifting infectious disease dynamics across human, animal, and environmental systems. Rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, and heatwaves, are reshaping pathogen ecology, host susceptibility, and microbial evolution. As climate change continues to alter global environmental conditions, understanding its influence on AMR has become a critical scientific and public health priority.
A growing body of evidence suggests that climate-driven shifts and environmental change actively accelerate the emergence and dissemination of AMR. Warming temperatures directly influence microbial growth, survival, adaptation, and evolution, while extreme climate events redistribute pathogens, resistance genes, and antimicrobials across natural and built environments. Concurrently, environmental contaminants, including antibiotic residues, fungicides, heavy metals, biocides, and microplastics, interact with climate-related stressors to drive the co-selection and persistence of resistance traits across diverse ecosystems.
From a One Health perspective, climate change impacts all the interconnected environmental, animal, and human systems. Importantly, environmental reservoirs, including soils, freshwater systems, wastewater infrastructure, and agricultural settings, are increasingly recognised as critical interfaces where climate-driven changes influence pathogen ecology, horizontal gene transfer, and the evolution of resistance. Climate change may also modify host susceptibility, microbiome composition, vector distributions, and patterns of human and animal exposure, creating new opportunities for the emergence and spread of resistant pathogens.
Despite growing recognition of these linkages, substantial knowledge gaps remain regarding the mechanisms or processes linking climate change to AMR and the future public health burden of these interwoven crises. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary approaches that integrate microbiology, ecology, epidemiology, environmental science, and public health. Advances in genomic surveillance, environmental monitoring and modelling, and data-driven approaches, including artificial intelligence, offer new opportunities to characterise climate-sensitive AMR risks and identify effective mitigation strategies.
This Collection invites and aims to bring together cutting-edge research integrating microbiology, ecology, epidemiology, hydrology, environmental science, and public health to characterize climate-sensitive AMR risks. We welcome fundamental, translational, clinical, and policy-focused studies that elucidate mechanisms linking climate and AMR, enhance surveillance and predictive capabilities, and use AI-driven modelling to identify effective mitigation strategies and interventions to reduce climate-associated resistance risks. By fostering cross-disciplinary perspectives within a One Health framework, this Collection seeks to advance understanding of one of the most pressing and rapidly evolving challenges facing global health.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Drivers and mechanisms: Climate-driven changes in distribution, emergence, and transmission of infectious diseases, horizontal gene transfer, microbial adaptation, resistance evolution, and the co-selection of AMR through interactions between climate change and pollution (e.g., antimicrobials, biocides, heavy metals, microplastics).
- Ecosystems and reservoirs: The role of aquatic, terrestrial, agricultural, and urban/wastewater infrastructure as reservoirs, including the impacts of climate and hydrological variability (seasonality) and extreme weather (floods, droughts, heatwaves) on pathogen spread, persistence, and AMR transmission.
- Host-Pathogen dynamics: Climate effects on microbiomes, immune responses, host susceptibility, and vector-borne or environmentally transmitted diseases, evaluated using genomic, epidemiological, modelling, and data-driven approaches.
- Surveillance and solutions: One Health surveillance approaches across human, animal, and environmental interfaces, integration of artificial intelligence/machine learning and big data to understand or predict AMR risks, and policy frameworks or intervention strategies for climate-associated AMR.
