Impact of climate change on Chinese medicinal plants and adaptation strategies

Global climate change threats to plant communities worldwide. This review explicitly narrows its scope exclusively to Chinese medicine plants (CMPs), the core raw materials for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). CMPs are distinguished by clinical efficacy dependent on complex secondary‑metabolite mixtures, geo‑authentic (Daodi) production systems, and large‑scale industrial supply chains. Existing studies remain fragmented, most studies examine single‑factor stress, whereas few systematically link ecological shifts, phytochemical disturbance, clinical therapeutic performance, and industrial supply‑chain risks. This review synthesizes multi‑source evidence to unpack climate‑driven impacts on CMPs, highlights unresolved research limitations, and proposes tiered, evidence‑informed adaptation pathways, while explicitly distinguishing theoretical proposals, laboratory‑validated approaches and field‑proven practical solutions.

We synthesized published field surveys, controlled physiological experiments, species‑distribution modelling outputs, and post‑harvest quality assessments. Impacts were organized across three dimensions of ecological adaptability (habitat shift, population decline), phytochemical disruption (shifts in secondary-metabolism profiles), and industrial‑clinical consequences (supply volatility, altered therapeutic potency). We systematically evaluated study limitations, inconsistent empirical observations, and translational gaps between laboratory results and real‑world field conditions, and marked whether quantitative data originated from field measurement, controlled experiment or model simulation.

Climate warming drives poleward and uphill habitat shifts for many CMP species, compressing suitable niches for geo‑authentic endemic taxa and exacerbating wild‑resource scarcity. Combined stressors (temperature anomalies, erratic precipitation, elevated CO₂ and intensified pest pressure) jointly disrupt secondary-metabolite regulatory networks, altering absolute concentrations and proportional balances of bioactive constituents. Under combined heat‑humidity exposure, toxic metabolites may accumulate. These cascading effects translate into reduced yield, market price volatility, potential shifts in therapeutic activity inferred from phytochemical alteration, elevated pesticide-residue risks, and shortened post-harvest shelf-life. Key unresolved gaps include insufficient long‑term coupled ecological‑pharmacological-postharvest monitoring, poorly characterized multi‑stressor interaction mechanisms, absence of climate‑adjusted herbal quality benchmarks, and under-recognized post-harvest quality risk amplified by extreme weather. Notably, many proposed adaptation interventions are only validated under laboratory conditions, or are transferred from conventional crop systems, and lack large‑scale field demonstration; conflicting experimental outcomes across different species and test conditions also constrain generalizable conclusions CONCLUSION: Climate change modifies CMP phytochemical composition and may thereby influence clinical value via interconnected pre‑harvest and post‑harvest mechanistic chains; direct evidence linking such phytochemical shifts to altered therapeutic outcomes remains limited. A suite of promising strategies exists, including climate-informed wild-germplasm conservation, stress-resistant molecular breeding, precision ecological cultivation, multi-indicator long-term surveillance, standardized post-harvest processing, and cross‑jurisdictional cooperation. Nevertheless, most of these measures have not been broadly implemented. Interdisciplinary frameworks integrating climatology, plant pharmacology, agronomy, and herbal industrial processing are required to build climate‑resilient TCM supply chains and help maintain consistent therapeutic outcomes, pending further empirical validation linking phytochemical shifts to clinical performance, for public‑health purposes.