Sakura Season: What the Cherry Blossom Bloom Tells Us About Climate Change
Japan’s cherry blossoms had their earliest peak in 1200 years — experts say that warming temperatures are the culprit.
Each spring, canopies of breathtaking pink and white blossoms blanket the cities of Japan to tell of its arrival.
The celebration of this blooming season is an integral Japanese tradition dating back centuries, starting between 794 to 1185 AD, however gaining its popularity in the last few decades as a captivating tourist attraction.
The cherry trees have an important connection to Japanese culture and history, with their bloom representing human life and transience and their ephemerality thought to signify the fleeting beauty of the living, since the blossoms begin to fall around two weeks after their beauty peaks.
Likewise, they are also symbolic of invigoration and renewal, as they unofficially mark the end to bleak winter months and signify the long-awaited start of spring.
They have even served as a symbol of international unity between the United States and Japan, when Washington D.C’s first cherry trees were planted in 1912, as a gift symbolizing the friendship between the two countries. Years later, these trees continue to adorn the U.S. capital with their blossoms, where their bloom is celebrated in harmony with Japan.
These much-revered flowers, known as Sakura, have tourists flocking to Japan throughout their blooming season, which typically lasts from mid-March to early May, to take part in flower viewing parties (hanami) and admire their beauty.
During its peak blossom period in mid-March, the Japanese capital of Tokyo is annually packed with tourists, while Northern cities like Kyoto don’t usually witness the full bloom until April.
This year, however, the arrival of spring was marked sooner than expected, as the Japanese cities that typically had a late cherry blossom bloom peaked early, with Kyoto topping this list, reaching its peak bloom on March 26.
Yasuyuki Aono, a researcher at Osaka Prefecture University, has gathered records from Kyoto back to 812 AD from historical documents and diaries.
These records indicate that this season had the earliest peak date the city had seen in over 1,200 years.
And in Tokyo, cherry blossoms reached full bloom on March 22, the second-earliest date on record.
Since the blossoms have traditionally been characteristic of the emergence of spring, scientists fear that their early bloom, coinciding with rising temperatures, may be linked to climate change.
Kyoto has faced an exceptionally warm spring this season, with March temperatures having risen from an average of 47.5 degrees Fahrenheit in 1953 to 51.1 degrees Fahrenheit in 2020, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
“Sakura blooms are very temperature sensitive,” said Aono. “Flowering and full bloom could be earlier or later depending on the temperature alone,” he said.
While peak dates shift every year, they have shown a general trend of moving earlier and earlier in the last few decades, causing scientists to point to climate change as the potential culprit.
This trend of rising temperatures and early blooming was explored by a Biological Conversation study, where researchers examined records of cherry blossom festivals celebrated in Kyoto from as early as the ninth century to pinpoint what the climate was like historically.
The findings reveal that early flowering can be caused by a combination of urbanization and climate change.
With increased urbanization, cities tend to get warmer than the surrounding rural area, in what is called the urban heat island effect, a phenomenon that has enhanced in Kyoto over the last 200 years.
The larger reason behind this is climate change, primarily caused by the global burning of fossil fuels, resulting in rising temperatures across the region and the world.
The result of this is an earlier spring, and accordingly, an earlier cherry blossom season.
Even the cherry trees overseas in D.C. reached their peak bloom on March 28, which is about six days sooner than they did a century ago.
Similar to Japan, the weather in the U.S. capital has also shown a pattern of warmer springs, with a 2.88 degrees Fahrenheit increase in the last 100 years.
Their early bloom, however, only begins to scratch the surface of a worldwide phenomenon that could destabilize natural systems and countries’ economies, said Amos Tai, associate professor of Earth System Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
This isn’t just a matter of tourists scrambling to catch the peak bloom before the petals fall — it has serious implications that could have a lasting impact on entire ecosystems, and threaten the survival of many species.
Over the past decade, some plant and animal populations have already begun shifting to both “higher altitudes” and “higher latitudes” to escape the effects of climate change.
And as climate change makes the weather more and more unpredictable, it’s becoming harder and harder for ecosystems to adapt.
While the trend of flowering dates is generally moving consistently earlier, unexpected and extreme weather means that there is still huge variability year-by-year.
“Ecosystems are not accustomed to these kinds of large fluctuations, it causes them a lot of stress,” said Tai. “Productivity may be reduced, and ecosystems may even collapse in the future.”
Warmer temperatures could cause other plants to bloom early as well. With so many plants blooming at once, bees are left with a dizzying amount of plants to choose from, resulting in possible cross pollination.
This early bloom phenomenon has been posing big problems for food security and farmers’ livelihoods.
In terms of crops and agriculture, climate change translates to more severe weather like droughts, floods, or even swarms of insects that could significantly reduce crop years, according to National Geographic.
As a result, people around the world could be left with less food and little means of obtaining it.
“(Farmers) have a much harder time predicting when they will have a good year, when they will have a bad year,” Tai added. “Agriculture now is more like a gamble, because climate change is randomizing the things happening in our ecological systems.”
So, as we enjoy the sight of the blooming cherry blossoms in our own neighborhoods, we must note that the beauty of their arrival isn’t just a sign of renewal, but as their petals fall, it is a reminder of the agricultural ruin and disrupted ecosystems that await if climate change is not taken seriously.
In the words of Patrick Gonzalez, the principal climate scientist at the US National Park Service:
“To the extent that the public realizes that the blooming of cherry trees and other signals in the natural world are showing us the impacts of carbon pollution from cars, power plants, and other human sources, then the increase in awareness helps us move towards a solution to the problem.”
