The Japanese look forward to the cherry blossom season every year. Usually, o-hanami, the cherry blossom festival, starts in April, but this year the buds on the trees blossomed on March 21st. Why aren’t biologists excited about this early start?
This year, cherry blossoms in Japan bloomed unexpectedly early. Scientists said that there is nothing to rejoice here, because this is a symptom of a large-scale climate crisis that threatens ecosystems around the world.
Yasuyuki Aono, a biologist at Osaka Prefectural University, studied cherry blossom dates in Kyoto back to 812 AD and found that at the end of March, cherry blossoms bloomed for the first time in 1200 years. According to Aono, only a few times in the history of mankind, sakura delighted the inhabitants of Kyoto with their flowers this early.
The early flowering of this beautiful tree surprised not only the Japanese: the cherry blossoms in Washington also did not bloom when they usually did. According to the National Park Service, the peak of cherry blossoms in Washington DC has moved almost a week from April 5 to March 31.
The reasons for the early flowering are urbanization and climate change, said Amos Tai, associate professor of earth sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The plants can sense the temperature, Tai says, and if it stays warm for a few days, they start to bloom. And since insects do not have time to respond to a rapid change in temperature, they do not have time to prepare for flowering, they can be left without food, and plants without pollination.
Not only sakura is now blooming earlier. The same is happening to many crops and economically valuable plants, hurting many farms.
Various crops in different, including vulnerable, regions of the world suffer from droughts, crop failures and locust invasions. In some regions, farmers are forced to grow unfamiliar crops in order to provide a little more food during the dry months.
What should we think about today, admiring the cherry blossoms? The fact that, unfortunately, the beauty of nature is vulnerable, and it is still in our power to protect it from ourselves. To continue to admire the flowers of Japanese cherry every spring.