Medicinal plants and natural products under the challenges of climate change: Quo vadis in research and development?

Dramatic changes to the global climate as well as the fast rise in the demand of natural resources strongly impact all aspects of medicinal and other high value plant (and fungal) resources, The supply and sourcing of wild plant populations and cultivated resources are classical examples impacting on established and traditional production systems. All these changes have accelerated enormously over the last few decades. Research and development need to integrate a more sustainability-centred strategy into their research and development strategies [ 1 ]. Based on a scoping review by our group the current state of research on how climate change affects medicinal plants, focusing on ecological shifts, traditional uses, changes in secondary metabolites, and adaptation strategies. (Takubessi et al, unpublished). The field has been slow in embracing these challenges and the majority of all studies concentrates on the major producer and consumer countries in Asia esp. China and India. There are diverse attempts to improve the footprint of research in the field, and while this is a major task, we need to refocus what the areas of research are we need to focus on. There is a limited appreciation for the need to incorporate sustainable, long-term sourcing into the research and development strategies if new products are to be developed. Research on sustainability and climate change is not yet a focal area and an interdisciplinary, coordinated response is urgently needed to ensure sustainability and a transdisciplinary approach is needed to ascertain a response helping to ensure reducing the impact of the field on climate change, mitigation of climate changes impact and, importantly, the integration of methods from climate change research, biogeography, human ecology and other relevant fields of research. Publication History Article published online: 05 March 2026 © 2026. Thieme. All rights reserved. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Oswald-Hesse-Straße 50, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany