In the early twenty-first century, climate change has progressively expanded the range of mosquito species including Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus northward into previously temperate regions of Europe and North America, bringing dengue, chikungunya, and Zika to areas previously free of these diseases. The Anopheles mosquito's range is also expanding, raising fears of malaria in regions that eradicated it decades ago. Climate scientists and epidemiologists have identified the mosquito as one of the primary biological vectors through which climate change will affect human health.

The expanding mosquito and its implications for human health have become a subject of contemporary environmental and eco-poetry. Writers including Juliana Spahr, Craig Santos Perez, and various poets of the Pacific and Global South have incorporated the climate-mosquito-disease nexus into their verse as evidence of the biological consequences of environmental destruction. The mosquito is once again, as it was in the age of empire, a figure for the limits of human control over the natural world — but now the threat comes from within, from the consequences of humanity's own impact on the planet's climate.