While we were researching on non-timber forest produce and climate change in Uttar Pradesh, this important and timely piece reports on similar environmental erosion in Central India.

"The (adivasi) women presented a long list of changes that alarmed them. Every alternate year, mahua flowers and seeds, from which edible oil and country liquor are made, now appeared in far smaller quantities than they did earlier. Charoli, or chironji, fruit thrived for some time, but were then typically destroyed by unseasonal summer rain. Their trees lived only four or five years before succumbing to disease. The price of gum, called dinka in Marathi, had decreased because the trees that people tapped yielded poor quality black gum, not clear gum.

These changes have occurred as the region, part of Central India, has witnessed massive shifts in climate patterns. A 2017 study by Roxy Mathew Koll of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, published in Nature, found that there had been an increase of between 10% and 30% in extreme rainfall events in Central India between 1950 and 2015. (Both insufficient and excessive rain can damage forest products.)Maharashtra also saw significant hailstorms, which are damaging to crops and forest products. A 2017 study in the Indian Meteorological Department’s journal Mausam found that from 1981 to 2015, the largest frequency of hailstorms in one season happened in Maharashtra in 2014.

For the millions of people, typically from Adivasi communities, who depend on forest products, these changes can hurt an essential part of their annual earnings.

It also has a broader effect: when funnelled through middlemen, the products feed an estimated Rs 2 lakh crore economy that is spread throughout India. They serve as raw material for medicines, cosmetics, food, oils, and other essential items. This year, as an unprecedented heatwave swept India, with March being the hottest since the Indian Meteorological Department started recording weather data in 1901, many forest crops wilted. While the effects of climate change on forest products are itself worrying, what is also alarming is the scant attention that is being paid to the problem."

https://scroll.in/article/1025124/battered-by-climate-change-central-indias-forest-products-are-disappearing