Initially, 2168 articles were retrieved from four databases: Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, and EBSCOhost. After removing 896 duplicates, 1272 articles remained (Fig. 1). Following title and abstract screening, 1068 articles were excluded as irrelevant, leaving 204 for full-text review. This resulted in 105 articles meeting inclusion criteria, focusing on the association between climate/weather and WNV or its transmission due to climate changes.

Flowchart diagram illustrating the article search and selection process

To comprehensively cover literature on the impact of climate change on WNV, we used specific search terms based on key themes from prior studies [37, 38]. Although these terms helped in retrieving targeted and relevant literature, their specificity might have restricted the scope, possibly excluding significant studies that broader terms could have included. Hence, the reviewers recommended 36 relevant articles, which we screened and retained 15 articles according to the inclusion criteria.

The comprehensive review included 120 studies divided into two categories: 83 studies focused on the associations between climate/weather and WNV, and 37 studies examined the impacts of climate change on WNV transmission. All the reviewed evidence and related adaptation responses are available for exploration and download through a dedicated Shiny web application (https://2xzl2o-neaop.shinyapps.io/WNVScopingReview/).

The number of published studies on climate change and WNV has increased over time, with a sharp rise observed after 2013 (Fig. 2). Regarding the temporal distribution of relevant literature, two key observations can be made.

Distribution of the publication years in all articles included from 2007 to 2023

First, only 26 articles were published between 2007 and 2012, of which 21 articles focused on the associations between climate/weather [47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67] and 5 articles examined the impacts of climate change on WNV [25, 68,69,70,71]. The earliest study on climate/weather factors and WNV, published in 2007, analyzed the association between precipitation and human WNV incidence in the US during 2002–2004. The first article on the impacts of climate change on WNV, published in 2007, investigated WNV prevalence in wild Greater Sage-Grouse populations across Montana and Wyoming during 2003–2005. The relatively small number of studies before 2013 indicates that relevant research was still in its infancy stage.

Second, most studies on this topic (n = 94) emerged after 2013, corresponding to the release of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report in 2014 and the Lancet Commission on Climate and Health in 2015 [34, 35]. As authoritative reviews synthesizing the state-of-the-art science on anthropogenic climate change and its health consequences, these landmark reports have stimulated new research assessing climate impacts on infectious diseases like WNV.

The geographical distribution of study locations examined in the articles is shown in Fig. 3. The most frequently studied region was North America, representing 59.2% of articles (n = 71). Within North America, 53 articles focused on the US [25, 27, 28, 47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62, 68, 72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104], 17 on Canada [31, 32, 63, 64, 69, 105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114,115,116], and 1 covered the entire continent [22]. Europe was the second most studied region, accounting for 28.3% of articles (n = 34) [23, 26, 65, 70, 71, 117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129,130,131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139,140,141,142,143,144,145]. The other world regions assessed were Asia (n = 4; 3.3%) [66, 146,147,148], Africa (n = 4; 3.3%) [67, 149,150,151], South America (n = 2; 1.7%) [24, 152], and Oceania (n = 1; 0.8%) [