Climate change exacerbates pathogenic threats in rivers with various land cover types

Pathogen exposure has received considerable attention because of its widespread occurrence, persistent risks, and significant impact on human and animal health. Here, we construct and analyze a global atlas of pathogens from 501 river metagenome samples across 4 different land cover types. We find that climate is a primary determinant of the global pathogen burden, explaining 36.2–41.6% of the variations in the diversity, risk and relative abundance of pathogens, significantly exceeding socioeconomic and water property factors. Agricultural and urban rivers serve as significant pathogen reservoirs, where rising temperatures and precipitation enrich core pathogens. An integrated framework combining diverse pathogenic characteristics can be used to quantify riverine pathogen risk. A climate-driven cascade mechanism amplifies pathogen risk. By 2100, pathogen diversity and risk will increase greatly in agricultural (10.6–12.0%) and urban river (8.0–10.8%) ecosystems and will be more pronounced under fossil fuel industry-dependent future scenarios. These findings highlight the necessity of both climate and land use changes to improve the accuracy of risk forecasting for waterborne pathogens under global change scenarios, especially in sensitive agricultural and urban rivers.