It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh and, ugh, mosquitoes. They love me. I loathe them.

But we have to understand mosquitoes, says scientist Cameron Webb. In his 2019 talk from Ted X. Paramata,

he lays out the relationship between mosquitoes and the

creatures they rely on, like us, and how we can create green environments for the future without

creating a major mosquito problem at the same time.

We're going to have hotter, drier summers in our cities. We're going to have to deal with

more frequent and more intense heat waves. It's going to have an impact on our health and

well-being, but not just us. What about the plants and animals that call our cities home?

So what can we do about that? We could green

our cities. We could plant trees. The shade provided by trees provides protection from those

impacts of the heat. But what do we need to make those plants thrive and survive? We need

water. Our green cities need water, but mosquitoes also like water.

And so how can we balance the impacts that come from both of those if we perhaps are

inadvertently creating increasing pest and public health risks for ourselves in the ways in which

we try to respond

to a changing climate. How can we green our cities and not create a problem with mosquitoes?

Now, mosquitoes are the deadliest animals on the planet. About half a million people die

every year because of mosquito bite. Diseases such as malaria and dengue infect hundreds of millions of people every year across the planet.

That burden of disease weighs quite heavily on both communities and local authorities as they

struggle to try to deal with those impacts.

Here in Australia, we're very fortunate to be free of some of the more serious mosquito-borne

diseases,

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