Climate and Zoonotic Risk in the Niger Delta: A One Health Approach to Predictive Drivers and Adaptation in a Tropical Delta System — A Critical Review

sense usually invoked in health-sy stem discussions. The gap identified above is specific: the routine, continuous integration of climate and environmental data into disease surveillance has not yet been extended beyond a single disease for which a dedicated academic research effort happened to build it. This is a narrower, and in principle more tractable, problem than building climate-health integration capacity from nothing, because the Lassa fever case demonstrates the necessary data-linking methodology already works with Nigerian data sp ecifically. A further dimension warrants explicit discussion. The mangrove degradation documented above, with over half attributable to oil-spill activity, illustrates that a portion of the Niger Delta's climate-vulnerability profile is not purely a function of global emissions to which the region has contributed negligibly, but is compounded by decades of extractive-industry environmental damage concentrated in the same geography now facing the highest sea-level-rise and flood exposure (O'Farrell et al., 2025). This c ompounding of climate vulnerability with industrial environmental degradation is a documented feature of the region's risk profile, distinct from, though related to, the general climate-equity observation, discussed in related prior work on this region's food-system antimicrobial resistance burden, that regions contributing least to global climate change often face its most acute health consequences with the least surveillance and adaptation capacity to respond. This review's principal contribution is bringing together, within a single analytical frame, evidence that in the literature reviewed exists largely in disease-specific or discipline-specific silos: climate projection science, mangrove remote-sensing analysis, entomological field surveillance, disease-specific epidemiological modelling for seven distinct pathogens, and institutional surveillance-capacity assessment. Considered separately, each of these literatures supports a narrower conclusion; considered t ogether, as attempted in the systems synthesis above, they support the more actionable conclusion that the region's climate-vector-disease-surveillance system has identifiable leverage points rather than being an undifferentiated problem too large to act on incrementally. Although this review is framed as a Niger Delta case study, several of its structural findings plausibly extend to other West African deltaic and coastal systems facing comparable pressures. The Sahelian tick-habitat expansion documented for Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever above is explicitly regional rather than Niger-Delta-specific, meaning the CCHF risk pathway described here is at least as relevant to livestock-keeping communities across the wider Sudano-Sahelian belt as to the Niger Delta itself (Ebert & Becker, 2025). Similarly, the Rift Valley fever rainfall-outbreak association documented across Mauritania, Senegal, and Niger demonstrates a transmission mechanism common to any West African delta or floodplain system with a substantial livestock population, not a phenomenon unique to Nigeria (Tinto et al., 2023). The institutional argument developed above, that climate-informed forecasting capability already demonstrated for one disease should be extended to others rather than rebuilt from scratch, is similarly not specific to Nigeria's institutional architecture in its logic, even though the specific evidence marshaled for it, the Lassa fever modelling literature, is a distinctly Nigerian body of work. Other West African countries with comparable IDSR-based surveillance systems and comparable climate exposure profiles face what this review would characterize as the same underlying leverage-point structure, even where the specific disease priorities and available modelling literature differ. This suggests that the systems framework developed here, if not every specific finding, has value as a template for climate-vector-disease analysis in other tropical, climate-exposed regions of comparable institutional capacity. Summary and Conclusion Much of the public conversation about climate change and disease-carrying insects focuses on new places seeing new problems, ticks and mosquitoes moving into parts of Europe and North America that used to be too cold for them. This review has examined the other side of that same story: what is happening in a place that already has these diseases, where the climate is changing just as fast, but where there are far fewer resources to notice the change happening. The Niger Delta in Nigeria, a low-lying river d elta with a large oil industry, extensive waterways, and a history of severe flooding, has been used as the example.