- Missouri has been important to wine. Very important.
- And China to beer.
- 7 things that are important for future food systems. Spoiler alert: diversity underpins all 7.
- Why biodiversity is important to diets. And vice versa.
- Why biodiversity is important to agriculture. And vice versa.
- No worries, now anyone can have a genebank.
The Economist on investing in adapting agriculture
A much wider range of adaptations will be needed if food is to remain as copious, varied and affordable as it is today. These will include efforts to help crops withstand warmer temperatures, for example through clever crop breeding, advances in irrigation and protection against severe weather. Rich and poor countries alike should also make it a priority to reduce the amount of food that is wasted (the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation guesses that more than one-third is squandered). The alternative will be a world that is hungrier and more unequal than it is at present—and than it might have been.
That’s from The Economist‘s analysis last week of projected shifts in the distribution of crops around the world as a result of climate change. Needless to say, genetic diversity will be needed to do all those good things. Investors read The Economist, right?
Investing in biodiversity
What do investors think of biodiversity? Well, a new report from Credit Suisse and Responsible Investor says that they’re increasingly interested, but that they are not (yet) putting their money where their mouths are. The reason?
Investors are struggling to identify and consider biodiversity-linked investment opportunities. Biodiversity needs to be made more digestible and measurable for investor concerns to translate into investment action…
More digestible? Now there’s an opportunity for agricultural biodiversity at least.
The challenge of protecting wildlife and nature has fallen behind many other sustainability issues for investors and governments alike. Part of the explanation likely lies in the complexity of biodiversity and its loss. “Diversity is the opposite of investors’ desire for standardisation and comparability of things,” says Piet Klop, Senior Advisor Responsible Investment, PGGM. “Biodiversity is challenging because it really is the anti-commodity.”
Ah yes, functioning ecosystems and food as anti-commodities. Can we not muster some decent arguments against this pernicious view?
Brainfood: Pollinators double, C4 grasses, Pre-breeding, Lupins resources, New wild coffees, Refugee deforestation, Tuber niches, Sampling strategy, Infection risk, Levant Bronze & Iron Age
- A global-scale expert assessment of drivers and risks associated with pollinator decline. “Key findings: 1) risks to human well-being from pollinator decline are higher in the Global South; 2) there is a clear lack of knowledge about pollinator decline in Africa; 3) loss of managed pollinators (e.g. honey bees) is only a serious risk to people in North America.” That’s according to the main author Dr Lynn Dicks on Twitter.
- Agrochemicals interact synergistically to increase bee mortality. Stress on pollinators is more than the sum of its parts.
- Evolutionary innovations driving abiotic stress tolerance in C4 grasses and cereals. Major C4 crops need more stress.
- Deep scoping: a breeding strategy to preserve, reintroduce and exploit genetic variation. You may not need a separate pre-breeding programme to introduce new diversity into your breeding programme without wrecking it.
- Genomic resources for lupins are coming of age. Maybe we could have a pre-breeding programme now?
- Six new species of coffee (Coffea) from northern Madagascar. Including 4 really narrow endemics. I wonder what they taste like. Start evaluation and pre-breeding?
- Refugee camps and deforestation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Much, much less of an impact that you’d think.
- Suitability of root, tuber, and banana crops in Central Africa can be favoured under future climates. More than you’d have thought.
- Proportional sampling strategy often captures more genetic diversity when population sizes vary. Sample more than you normally would from bigger populations of rare wild species.
- Plant pathogen infection risk tracks global crop yields under climate change. Where yields go up, fungal/oomycete infection risk goes up; where yields go down, so does infection risk. Assemblages will change especially in temperate regions.
- Developments in Subsistence Practices from the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age in the Southern Levant. From pigs, wild animals and emmer to zebu, camelids, and free-threshing wheats.
Nibbles: New Roots for Restoration Biology Integration Institute, Olive genebanks, Saving old grapevines
- New institute to restore ecosystems, including agricultural ones, gets money.
- Some olive-based ecosystems certainly need restoration, good thing there are genebanks.
- Sometimes, restoring ecosystems means digging up old grapevines and moving them down the road.