Reflections from 2024
As the year comes to an end, it’s a good time to reflect on all that has happened in 2024.
This past year, we witnessed again climate change significantly influence the spread and intensity of infectious diseases around the world, exacerbating public health challenges. From record-breaking dengue epidemics in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Bangladesh to the emergence of Oropouche fever in South America, rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall fueled the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses. In several African countries, climate-induced shifts expanded malaria transmission to previously unaffected areas and intensified cholera outbreaks as extreme weather events compromised water and sanitation infrastructure. These crises reveal the intricate connections between climate and public health, highlighting the need for collaborative action to build resilient, climate-adaptive health systems capable of addressing these growing challenges.
Over the last 18 months, the devastating events in occupied Palestinian territory, Tigray, and the Sudans have also claimed countless lives and displaced millions, revealing that global health emergencies stem not only from scientific challenges but also from entrenched political interests, global anti-Blackness, and oppressive structures. As Lioba Hirsch wrote in her recently published book, “Antiblackness and Global Health”: “[W]e need to abandon the idea of health and science as apolitical.” While the climate-related disease outbreaks emphasize the urgency of scientific intervention, the global atrocities we witnessed in 2024 demonstrate how deeply entrenched colonial structures and a lack of courage, imagination, and political will continue to fail the most marginalized. Addressing global health inequities requires not only advancements in science and technology but also political education and “decolonizing the mind” to dismantle the practices, structures, and entrenched interests that perpetuate systemic harm.
CSID Network enables members to collaborate on the co-design, development, and maintenance of Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease (CSID) tools that are relevant, accessible, and impactful. Our community of practice actively addresses two major barriers: (1) academic systems that discourage scientific collaboration and undervalue software and community work, and (2) the racial inequities pervasive in scientific and CSID modeling fields. We aim to build relationships rooted in mutual aid, fostering a community-led CSID field and ensuring long-term network sustainability. Drawing inspiration from democratic governance and distributed leadership models, we are expanding our collective capacity to shape our own work, sustain efforts beyond arbitrary grant timelines, and bridge geographic and professional divides.
If our approach resonates with you, join us in building a transnational community animated by horizontality, peer learning, and open collaboration. Subscribe to our email newsletter at CSID-community+subscribe@groups.io for updates on our 2025 membership launch and plans for our in-person gathering in Thailand next July.
Our Values
- We prioritize equity in our science and network-building efforts. Our goal is to break away from conventional global science models where extraction—whether from individual researchers or from communities in certain regions—is common practice. Without embedding equity into every aspect of our work, we risk replicating the extractive and oppressive systems we aim to dismantle, creating dynamics that alienate the very communities we seek as partners.
- Building good relations is essential for genuine collaboration and reciprocity. Too often, “collaboration” is mandated by international scientific and development agencies, resulting in transactional relationships that rarely last, sustained only by funding. Inspired by Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, CSIDNet values the processes necessary to create and nurture good relations, recognizing that these relationships are foundational for authentic collaboration and meaningful reciprocity.
- We believe in sharing what we can for collective futures. “Open science” has faced legitimate critiques: only those with privilege can fully participate; there are longstanding histories of extraction cloaked as openness; and open science can sometimes deepen marginalization. CSIDNet, however, believes that collaboration and knowledge-sharing—grounded in mutuality and care—are essential to achieving social justice through science. We advocate for a model of open science that builds toward collective, equitable, and just futures.