Arturo Casadevall is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has spent four decades investigating how fungi can both improve and devastate life as we know it. His new book, What If Fungi Win?, charts how we might overcome the rising threat.

Everything in our environment is being affected as temperatures rise; there’s no reason to believe fungi will be an exception.

Candida auris was unknown to medicine until 2007 when it was recovered from the ear of an individual in Japan. And then a few years later, in 2010, 2011, 2012, it emerges independently on three continents [South America, Africa and the Indian subcontinent].

So we have a medical mystery. We have an organism that medicine didn’t know anything about. One of the things that we have proposed is that this may have been the first fungus to breach our thermal barriers [most fungi cannot survive at 37C degrees, the body’s internal temperature] after adapting to higher temperatures. It is likely the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change.

(But) fungi are critical elements for life on Earth. They benefit us in foodstuffs – you can’t have wine without fungi, you can’t have fermentation without fungi. They are the source of groundbreaking medicines, such as penicillin and statins. Innovators are using fungi to make vegan leather car seats and construction materials. Others are using them to degrade the plastics that fill our landfills. Going forward, they may be sources of new materials, things that could make our everyday life better.