Environmental and mosquito microbiomes affect mosquito-borne disease transmission under climate change

Mosquito-borne diseases remain a major global health challenge, and their transmission dynamics are increasingly influenced by climate change. Rising temperatures, altered precipitation, and extreme climatic events influence mosquito distributions, development, and pathogen replication and incubation. In parallel, accumulating evidence indicates that mosquito-associated microbiomes can modulate key stages of pathogen transmission, including midgut infection, immune responses, and dissemination. Despite these advances, microbial processes are still rarely incorporated into climate-vector frameworks. Here, we synthesize emerging work showing that climate change reshapes mosquito-borne disease risk not only through direct effects on vectors and pathogens, but also by restructuring environmental microbial reservoirs and mosquito-associated microbiomes. This review discusses how climatic drivers modify larval habitats and aquatic microbiota, alter microbial acquisition across mosquito life stages, ultimately shaping adult midgut microbiome composition. We further summarize evidence that microbiome variation interacts with host physiology and immunity to modulate vector competence. Finally, we highlight key knowledge gaps, including the lack of long-term field studies that linking environmental microbial reservoirs to mosquito microbiomes and transmission outcomes, and the limited understanding of how microbiome-mediated effects scale from individual mosquitoes to population-level dynamics. By framing the microbiome as a dynamic regulatory layer that integrates environmental change with host processes, this review highlights microbial systems as a critical but underappreciated component of climate–vector biology and a promising target for improving prediction and control of mosquito-borne diseases.