According to a new study, climate change will significantly alter habitats for key tree species essential for livelihoods and medicinal use.
- The study indicates that non-timber forest produce from India’s tropical dry deciduous forests, such as bael (wood apple) and bahera, is expected to thrive, while species like chironji, mahua and amla (Indian gooseberry) will be negatively impacted,.
- The research considers climate scenarios from the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 2.6 and 8.5.
- The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) were used in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014 as a basis for the report’s findings.
- To understand how our climate may change in future, we need to predict how we will behave. For example, will we continue to burn fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, or will we shift towards renewable energy? The RCPs try to capture these future trends.
- They make predictions of how concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will change in future as a result of human activities.
- The four RCPs range from very high (RCP8.5) through to very low (RCP2.6) future concentrations. The numerical values of the RCPs (2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5) refer to the concentrations in 2100.
