Emerging Tree Diseases Driven by Climate Change: A Critical Perspective on Current Challenges and Future Directions

Climate change is fundamentally reshaping forest disease dynamics through direct effects on pathogen biology and indirect impacts on host physiology. Rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events are driving disease emergence by disrupting ecological relationships between trees and their microbial associates. This review examines how climate change compounds biotic and abiotic risks to forest health, distinguishing between climate-pathogen diseases, where climatic shifts directly favor pathogen activity, and climate-stress diseases, where physiological stress predisposes trees to decline. We explore the continuum from native pathogens gaining new opportunities to exotic pathogens establishing in previously unsuitable environments while considering distinctions among endophytes and latent and nonlatent pathogens. The review emphasizes critical knowledge gaps and highlights emerging research directions, including integration of genomics, remote sensing, and predictive modeling for disease surveillance, adaptive forest management strategies balancing disease mitigation with climate adaptation and new solutions for enhancing forest resilience under accelerating environmental change.