Compound impacts of climate change, urbanization and biodiversity loss on allergic disease

Climate change, airborne allergens, and three translational mitigation approaches

“…Similarly, other global changes such as desertification, urbanisation, and biodiversity loss will also have impacts on airborne allergens, and the relative importance of these in combination with climate change will likely vary from place to place and over time. 37 , 38 , 39 …”

Attributing long-term changes in airborne birch and grass pollen concentrations to climate change and vegetation dynamics

“…Increasing urbanization might also affect the rising allergenic pollen concentrations due to increased CO 2 (Ziello et al, 2012;Zhang and Steiner, 2022), or to the increased ornamental use of allergenic tree species (Aerts et al, 2021) combined with urban heat island effects (Charalampopoulos et al, 2021;Tong et al, 2022). A substantial decrease in birch pollen emission sources over the urban region of Brussels in the SILAM model (~− 8% per decade, Fig.…”

“…In Belgium, a highly industrialized and densely populated country with substantial air pollution (Verstraeten et al, 2018), at least ~10% of the people develop allergic rhinitis symptoms due to birch tree pollen and ~15% due to grass pollen (Blomme et al, 2013). In the future, even more people might be affected since climate change and land-use change elicit an increased amount of allergenic airborne pollen and prolonged pollen seasons (Anderegg et al, 2021;Beggs, 2021;Tong et al, 2022). The human influence on the climate system is clear-cut (IPCC, 2022), and the changes in climate, for instance the worldwide increased temperature of 1.2 ± 0.1 • C, have multiple impacts on the environment and public health (WMO, 2020).…”