Climate Change and Forest Vegetation Dynamics: Ecological Responses, Risks, Opportunities, and Adaptation with Special Reference to India—Systematic Review

Abstract

Forest vegetation dynamics are changing under climate change, with important implications for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, carbon cycling, and livelihoods. Vegetation regulates terrestrial carbon storage and biophysical feedbacks, but its responses to warming, changing precipitation, rising atmospheric CO2, and climate extremes are complex and spatially variable. This review presents a PRISMA-guided integrative synthesis of 74 peer-reviewed studies published between 1990 and 2025, incorporating evidence from remote sensing, long-term ecological observations, ecosystem flux measurements, experimental studies, and Earth system modelling. Rather than examining climatic drivers independently, the review synthesizes their interactions with water availability, nutrient limitation, land-use change, disturbance, and biotic processes across physiological, population, ecosystem, and biome scales, with particular emphasis on India. The synthesis reveals that vegetation responses are governed less by individual climatic drivers than by their interactions with resource availability, disturbance, land use, and ecosystem characteristics. Across the reviewed evidence, contrasting greening and browning trends, phenological shifts, species redistribution, and changes in productivity and carbon dynamics were observed. Importantly, greening does not consistently translate into enhanced ecosystem functioning or resilience because increased canopy development may occur alongside water and nutrient limitation, declining carbon-use efficiency, recurrent disturbance, land-use intensification, or changes in species composition. Indian evidence further demonstrates contrasting vegetation trajectories across forests, drylands, Himalayan ecosystems, and agricultural landscapes. Major uncertainties arise from differences among remote-sensing indicators, scale dependency, limited long-term experimental coverage, and incomplete representation of water, nutrient, disturbance, and vegetation processes in coupled climate–vegetation models. Overall, the review identifies a shift from assessing forest vegetation change primarily through greening toward evaluating ecosystem functioning, carbon permanence, and ecosystem resilience capacity as integrated indicators.