Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The Guardian has a photo essay on how farmers are trying to cope with climate change in Tajikistan. ((The images are also on Flickr.))
Turaqulov Saidmuzator, a farmer in Temumalik district, is experiencing the effects of climate change. ‘I think the weather has become warmer in the last four or five years and that is affecting our crops,’ he says. ‘The sickness of our crops is increasing but the pesticides are expensive and we are losing almost 30% of our crops to diseases.’
“Cherry trees require a minimum of 8,000 hours of low temperatures over the winter to produce the optimum blossoms, but as Japan gets warmer we are falling short of that figure,” said [Dr Abe].
“And that is a problem because we Japanese love cherry blossom season.”
Dr. Abe’s team has responded to this national crisis by creating a cherry tree that blooms in all four seasons, keeping its flowers for longer, producing more blossoms and under a wider range of temperatures than any existing breeds.
How? A combination of radiation and grafting. Which means that one will now be able to wear the Human Polllination Suit all year round.
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?
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.
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.
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!