Climate change

March 14, 2008May 12, 2009

Wheat and climate change

A review paper in the latest Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment looks at what climate change will do to wheat, and what can be done about it. ((ORTIZ, R. et al. (2008). Climate change: Can wheat beat the heat?. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. DOI: 10.1016/j.agee.2008.01.019)) The lead author is deputy director general at the International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT), and the picture he paints must be keeping him up at nights.

There are 12 different types of places where wheat is grown around the world — so-called “mega-environments.” They range from “high rainfall, hot” (e.g. in Bangladesh) to “low rainfall, severe cold” (around Ankara in Turkey). Some are better than others. One of the best is mega-environment 1, which amounts to 32 million hectares in northwest Mexico, the Indo-Gangetic Plains and the Nile Valley. It accounts for 15% of global wheat production, and it is in trouble.

When you look at the likely 2050 climate, half of the area of the Indo-Gangetic Plains which is now in mega-environment 1 might well need to be re-classified from pretty ideal low rainfall, irrigated, temperate to heat-stressed, short season. That is, conditions will look more like the Gezira in Sudan or Kano in Nigeria. That will reduce yields, affecting 200 million people.

So wheat breeders will have to develop varieties that can maintain yields under higher temperatures, unless you want farmers to switch to another crop entirely. Which might be the easiest thing in some places, actually, but that’s another story.

You can breed for resistance to an abiotic stress such as heat by growing a wide range of genotypes under that stress and looking for the highest yielding genotypes, of course. But what breeders at CIMMYT are now increasingly doing is trying to identify the different physiological attributes which are associated with high yield under stress conditions — things like leaf chlorophyll content during grain filling, for example. And then stacking them up together in new varieties. That’s had some success in breeding for drought resistance. Let’s hope — for the sake of Indian wheat farmers — that it works for heat too.

March 4, 2008

Adapting in the Andes

Climate change is leading to an increase in late blight and other diseasesÂ in Andean potato fields, and farmers are moving up the mountain in response. They’re also trying to figure out which of their dozens of varieties — plus others from genebanks, especially CIP’sÂ — are going to do best, where. Hear all about it at NPR. There’s a great slideshow too.

February 26, 2008February 27, 2008

Project BudBurst tracks climate change

Here’s a great idea:

Project BudBurst allows people to enter their backyard spring leaf budding and bloom data into an online database that will help track the changing blooming times of specific types of plants.

It covers basically native ornamental trees and shrubs in the US, but surely it could be applied to agricultural species, and be extended worldwide?

SBSTTA [decides]

SBSTTA’s recommendations on the review of the CBD’s programme of work on agrobiodiversity are out, after last week’s smackdown. As usual, there are analyses at UKabc and IISD. The general consensus seems to be that the recommendations have been weakened, but I talked to one person familiar with the negotiations who thought the text was actually clearer and more focused now. But a lot of square brackets remain, in particular the whole section on biofuels. One thing that struck me is the invitation by SBSTTA “to evaluate and characterize germplasm potentially suitable for adaptation to climate change.” I didn’t find that in the original document, so I am assuming it was added during the negotiations. It seems unusual for a CBD document in recognizing — albeit implicitly — the importance of ex situ conservation, at least in the context of climate change. But I don’t really know how these things work. I hope someone will explain it to me.

February 6, 2008

Agrobiodiversity and climate change in Madagascar

There’s a workshop going on in AntananarivoÂ on theÂ Impacts of Climate Change on Madagascar’s Biodiversity and Livelihoods. My friend Robert Hijmans is there and he sent me the link to the flickr site of one of the participants, Ratoza Harinjaka, who’s got some photos of the meeting up. Including this one of Robert.

Ratoza has kindly given his permission for us to use the photo. He has blogged about the workshop. Thanks for the use of the pic, Ratoza. If either you or Robert would like to write something for us on the meeting, you’re most welcome to do so. It sounds like the recommendations will be on the Foko website in due course. But it’s always nice to get it from the horse’s mouth.