近来，我们的地球和社会正面临气候变化的严重挑战。已有研究发现多种传染性疾病的发生、流行与气候变化密切相关。因而，十分需要开展气候变化对传染病的影响作用的研究。鼠疫是一种世界范围内重要的烈性传染病，鼠疫杆菌（Yersinia pestis）是其病原体。历史上曾爆发过三次鼠疫大流行，共造成约2亿人死亡，其中第三次流行起始于中国，共计感染260万人，其中220万人死亡。来自于不同鼠疫自然疫源地的研究表明气候变化影响鼠疫的发生与流行，但现有研究由于缺少覆盖全球疫源地的统一数据库和研究手段，难以开展比较研究及揭示气候影响鼠疫的深层机制性。本项目主要立足于中国和挪威两个生态学研究组合作，力求重建全球鼠疫流行数据库及全球尺度下的第三次世界鼠疫大流行的扩散路径，分析鼠疫大流行受气候调节的宏观格局，为气候影响下的鼠疫发生与传播提供新的认识和防控对策。

Our earth is facing great challenges of climate change. There have been good evidences that many infectious diseases are closely associated with climate change. Thus there is an urgent need to understand relationship between climate change and infectious diseases. Plague is a very dangerous disease transmitted by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and it is listed as one of the top infectious disease in the world.Three plague pandemic caused 0.2 billion people dead of the world; in China, 2.6 million people infected and 2.2 million people died. Plague has been preliminarily investigated in several regions, but due to inconsistency of method and data quality, it is still diffcult to make comparisons among different continents. The purpose of this project, under the close collaboration between the China and Norway teams, is to reconstruct the global database and spread pattern of the third plague pandemic, and to analyze the impact of climate change on prevalence and spread velocity of human plague. Output of this project will provide new insight as to the impact of climate change on plague occurences and transmission in a global scale.