Modeling climate sensitive infectious diseases in the Arctic

Forecasting the likely future prevalence of climate sensitive infectous diseases (CSIs) in the Arctic requires prediction of how environmental conditions, both aquatic and on the land, will change under a changing climate, together with knowledge of how these changes relate to the environmental conditionals for viability of CSI host organisms. This requires the use of land surface and hydro-climatic models that have been tested against past data and can be driven by climate projections provided by Global Circulation Models for a range of climate scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways). Uncertainties in the climate projections combine with uncertainties in the environmental models, and this combined uncertainty propagates through into subsequent CSI occurrence modelling. This chapter will describe the available environmental models, together with the data needed to drive and test them, and how we can address the uncertainty within these models, in the context of Arctic CSI prediction.