Global warming disrupts agriculture in unpredictable ways, causing acute food shortages in some of the poorest places on earth. But the health risks posed by hotter temperatures go well beyond malnutrition. Vector-borne diseases—like malaria, dengue fever, and tick-borne encephalitis—are beginning to spread far beyond current boundaries as the global thermostat creeps up. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that a 2°C to 3°C rise in average global temperatures could place hundreds of millions more people at risk of malaria.

And that’s just for starters. If, as expected, an uptick in natural disasters accompanies the planetary warming trend, things could get a lot worse. Floods, for instance, often spread diarrheal diseases such as cholera and typhoid, which the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reckons already kill about 1.6 million kids under the age of five every year—almost exclusively in the developing world. Given current climate trends, WHO expects the risk of diarrhea to climb 10% by 2030. Droughts too could exact a heavy toll. Long spells of hot and dry weather have been linked, among other things, to spikes in the incidence of meningococcal disease (popularly known as bacterial meningitis)—an often crippling illness that kills many children and young adults in Africa.

We may find it impossible to prevent or even contain the floods, fires, and hurricanes expected to accompany climate change. But we do have the tools in hand to mitigate the impact of infectious diseases, the best of which are vaccines.