Globally, countries have struggled to deal with the impacts of climate change, and India is no exception. Apart from causing extreme weather events and impacting food security, climate change poses significant challenges to our biodiversity endangering the ecosystem services it provides. Climate change impacts are expected to be particularly severe in low-to-middle income nations, and countries like India remain very vulnerable to these impacts. Changes in land-climate interactions will exacerbate biome-shifts and permanent loss of insects, plants, and vertebrates. Global change including climate change is already impacting tropical and sub-tropical forests. A main regulator of water dynamics is vegetation canopy phenology that reflects seasonal timing, duration, and magnitude of leaf area. Climate change, extreme weather events and the abovementioned threats are all known to individually alter canopy phenology. Little, however, is known about how global change drivers and climate variability and change alter ecosystem services in subtropical systems. In particular, it is not known how land surface phenology including growing period in these ecosystems responds to intense rain events in the wet-season and periods of very high temperature in the dry-season, and how these dynamics propagate to drive water fluxes. At large spatial scales and multi-decadal scales, the response of these ecosystems to recent climate variability and trends is also largely unknown. Although the consequences of climate-driven extreme weather events and ecosystem change are clear, little is known about the vulnerability of tropical forests which directly impacts the region’s social and economic well-being and the ecosystems and ecosystem services. Understanding these responses of forests to climate change in a geo-spatial framework for adaptive management of forests and forest restoration will have major implications for climate change vulnerability assessment, mitigation, and adaptation strategies.