Climate Change and Plant Diversity: Threats and Opportunities

Climate change is one of the alarming environmental concerns in the twenty-first century and so on affecting diverse ecosystems at various scales. Diversified plant species provides food, energy, health and other ecosystem services to human livelihood. Severely affected plant diversity due to climate change is a matter of great concern among scientists, policy makers and rising population. Hence, assessment of climate change-associated threats and opportunities to plant diversity become utterly important. Climate change has notable impact on growth, development as well as the reproductive success of plants, majorly due to change in the micro- or macro climate conditions. It also depends on the plant life form or plant groups as per-intrinsic tolerance and adaptation capacity of diverse group of plants. Multiple stresses co-occurring together under climate change vary greatly within plant group or plant types. In this chapter, we highlighted the threat posed by climate change to the plant diversity as a whole categorised under group, namely, algae, bryophyta and pteridophyte extended to gymnosperms and to the advanced or higher groups of plants such as angiosperms. In the ms the adaptive response of plant species distributed among the above group’s opportunities available to ensure ecosystems structure, processes and services were also explored and documented.