Making this dire warning was Dr Ravindranath, a professor at the Centre for Sustainable Technologies at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He emphasised that an expected 2ºC increase in temperature due to climate change would result in a major shift from the present “forest type as we know it”.

Major vegetation change is expected to occur in the forests of the Himalayas, western ghats, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir. The less affected states, Dr Ravindranath stressed, would be Orissa and the north-eastern states.

Different scientific modelling techniques confirm that overall, the “country will become hotter and wetter” as rainfall would increase in its intensity he said. Dr Ravindranath, who has contributed to eight reports of IPCC, including the IPCC-2007 Mitigation Report as well as the IPCC GHG Inventory Guidelines-2006, believes higher temperatures will also affect the regeneration and flowering patterns of these forests.

This frightening change has already been highlighted in the report submitted to the Prime Minister’s council on climate change which predicts “the percentage of forested grids expected to undergo vegetation change range from 3.5 per cent in the north-eastern states to 73 per cent ii Chhattisgarh.”

A change in the species of forest ecosystems would be accompanied by increased occurrences of fire, pests and loss of biodiversity.

This would affect the livelihood security of local communities since 275 million rural Indians depend on forest for their livelihoods.At present, forests absorb an estimated 1.6 million CO2 but this situation could reverse radically with forest fires becoming producers of CO2. Dr Ravindranath therefore has suggested that the ministry of environment and forests needs to prepare a long term monitoring strategy to ensure that trees that are grown in future will adapt to the changing environment.