Marilyn Ball

Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflict of interest. G. Tcherkez is an Editorial Board member of Plant Cell & Environment and a co-author of this article. To minimize bias, he was excluded from all editorial decision-making related to the acceptance of this article for publication. Data Availability Statement Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Every day we see the consequences of a failing mental health system unfold in our communities. Violent outbursts, repeated arrests, erratic behavior, and escalating threats have become a grim reality and one that law enforcement, the courts, and society at large seem powerless to stop. Again and again, individuals who clearly need serious psychiatric intervention are shuffled through a broken system, only to end up back on the streets, more unstable and more dangerous than before.

INTRODUCTION Global climate change is challenging many forested ecosystems with elevated temperatures and increasingly severe and frequent droughts, heat waves and outbreaks of biotic agents (Chou et al., 2013; Davy et al., 2017; Harvey et al., 2020; IPCC, 2022; Meehl & Tebaldi, 2004; Pureswaran et al., 2018).