I think we may have already blogged about WWF’s Climate Witness programme, and if not we should have. It’s a very “effective way to illustrate the impacts of climate change on real people in many different locations around the world, and the action they are taking to address the issues.” Several of the stories involve agriculture, of course. For example, Joseph Kones from Bomet in Kenya says that drought has been increasing in his area over the past 20 years, and that his farm is part of a pilot adaptation project involving tree planting and the building of terraces. It would be nice to extract all the agrobiodiversity-relevant examples of changes and adaptation to them. Perhaps a job for the Platform on Agrobiodiversity Research? Which incidentally we have just added to our blogroll. See what I did there?
The role of ex situ crop diversity conservation in adaptation to climate change
Department of Very Cool: Luigi’s presentation on The role of ex situ crop diversity conservation in adaptation to climate change was featured on the home page of SlideShare today.
The role of ex situ crop diversity conservation in adaptation to climate change
View more presentations from Luigi Guarino.
Course, it might be gone by tomorrow, so you’ll just have to trust me on this. At this very moment 65 people have seen it. Go, watch, boost his figures. Congratulations to Luigi.
Positively the last word on the Amman conference
It comes from our friends at CIAT, and points to the final version of the Amman Declaration on another CGIAR climate change blog. Yes, crop wild relatives are in there!
The challenge of keeping up with information on the challenge of improving nutrition
SciDev has a blitz on The Challenge of Improving Nutrition. It looks like it might repay closer scrutiny.
Drought resistance: “it’s complicated”
In case anyone out there is still wondering why all those early promises of drought-resistant crop varieties have been so long arriving, Ford Denison has a wonderfully clear explanation. He takes as his starting point a 2004 paper about the development of Drysdale wheat, bred in Australia for water use efficiency. And he came to that in search of counterexamples to his default view.
I’m always skeptical when someone speculates that we could double crop yield just by increasing the expression of some newly discovered “drought-resistance gene.” My rationale is that mutants with greater expression of any given gene are simple enough to have arisen repeatedly over the course of evolution.
The question Denison asks of Drysdale wheat is whether the tradeoffs that in the past prevented the selection of greater productivity — for example the ability to withstand drought being penalized in average and wetter years — are no longer relevant.
Rather than give away the answer, or attempt to summarize the key arguments, I just urge you to go and read the full post. I will, however, add a little tidbit I discovered all on my own (with Google’s help). You might think that naming a drought-resistant wheat Drysdale marks a marketing triumph. You would be wrong. It recalls Russell Drysdale, an Australian artist whose paintings of rural life in general and drought in particular captured the land and its people.