Medicinal-plant provenance is commonly recorded as a geographic property, yet climate instability increasingly challenges the assumption that material collected from the same named region will retain a chemically comparable state across years, seasons, developmental stages, and harvest conditions. This article develops an original provenance-risk model for medicinal plants that treats provenance as a dynamic combination of botanical identity, environmental exposure, developmental state, harvest timing, early post-harvest history, and analytical confidence. The supporting literature shows that climatic and edaphic variables can influence specialized-metabolite profiles, that different metabolite classes may respond differently to the same environmental stress, and that developmental and harvest transitions can substantially alter medicinal-material chemistry. These observations do not establish a universal direction of chemical change or demonstrate that chemical drift necessarily changes therapeutic efficacy. The proposed model therefore separates observed chemical variation from specification-relevant drift and, further, from any inference concerning therapeutic-quality consequences. It also preserves geographic origin as an essential baseline while rejecting its use as a sufficient proxy for the environmental and temporal conditions that generate the measured chemical state. The resulting framework is intended to support risk-informed sourcing, longitudinal chemical surveillance, and evidence-linked quality specifications rather than provide a validated predictive score. Prospective multi-year, multi-site, genotype-aware, analytically harmonized, and functionally qualified studies will be required before dynamic provenance can be translated into generalizable decision thresholds or regulatory practice.
