Category: Climate change

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The geography of rice

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Robert Hijmans has a great new global map of rice cultivation out. Robert is at IRRI now, hence his current preoccupation with rice, but he’s done the same thing for several other crops, and of course there are his cool cartograms too. I guess it is his map that underlies the figures of the potential impact of climate change.

Of course, this is a snapshot. How cultivation of a crop changes over time is difficult to capture in a single image, but there’s a map which does a pretty good job for maize.

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European corn borer not so boring

Jeremy had a post recently on how to keep track of emerging pests and diseases. Certainly services like ProMED-mail and HealthMap are incredibly valuable. But perhaps even better would be a way to predict what a disease might do before it actually does it, for example as a result of climate change. That’s what some Czech researchers have done for the European corn borer, a pest of maize. ((There’s also an assessment of the risk of spread to new areas in a recent study of the root-parasite Orobanche crenata, but that paper did not specifically consider climate change in any detail.)) They modelled its life cycle on the basis of daily weather data, both current, to see if the model fit reality, and possible future, to predict what the pest might do under different climate change scenarios. The result was that the corn borer will cover the entire agricultural area of the country by 2040-2075, by which time “maize is expected to partly replace traditional cereals (e.g. winter wheat, rye, etc.).” That’s a frightening prospect. Better start planning – and breeding – for it now. ((A recent paper on wheat spot blotch in the East Gangetic Plains of India, Bangladesh and Nepal describes how breeding has made good resistant varieties available, but adds that climate change is tilting the playing field in favour of the disease, which means that breeders can’t afford to rest on their laurels.))

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From the horse’s mouth

andyjarvis.jpg The recent paper showing that climate change threatens the wild relatives of crops received quite a bit of attention yesterday, being as how it was The International Day for Biodiversity. But even though the champagne has all gone and cake crumbs are all we have left, we decided to prolong the festivities just a little. So we called Andy Jarvis, lead author on the study and asked him to share a few thoughts. You can listen here.

You can also hear co-author Annie Lane over at Bioversity International’s news pages.

P.S. This may be the first in an occasional series of podcasts. Have you got something to say? Or would you like to hear someone or something particular? Let us know.

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Climate change: Diversity the mother of invention?

Our man with the factor 30 sunscreen and the big umbrella writes:

Climate change is the new black. Everyone’s talking about, if you haven’t experienced it, well frankly you haven’t lived. We’ve heard this week that 39% of the world will have novel climates in 2100 (via Eco-Justice Blog). The concept of “novel” climates is a little abstract, but the authors of the study did a good job of bringing attention to the fact that new solutions are needed to adapt to climate change. It’s not always just a question of transferring existing technologies and practices. Without alienating the good people who invited me to write this, I’m afraid that for these areas conventional crop improvement of some of the hardiest crops is perhaps the most rational means of confronting this. (No alienation here: Ed.) Either that or give up on agriculture in these regions and intensify in the less affected regions.

But the study leaves 61% of climates where change is predicted, but to a climate already found currently on the earth. That’s a calming thought, as long as of course we have faith in the conventional climate models and hope the doomsday scenarios don’t come true. This opens up a world of opportunities for agricultural biodiversity, where an eternal optimist like me could even think something good might come of it. After all, adversity is the mother of invention. Perhaps the building blocks for agriculture adapted to the Brazilian cerrados will come from landraces used by farmers from the Sahel belt in Niger.

What do we need to do?

We need to get out of the abstract paradigm that we’ve constructed of ex situ collections, leading to crop breeding of blanket solutions, followed by a less than optimal delivery of new seed technologies. Farmers have exchanged seeds informally for millennia, and the rich diversity of landraces is testament to the fact that this works, especially in the face of change. We need to go back a hundred years, and direct all our 21st century advances in international diplomacy and treaties, communication technologies and truly use our ex situ collections to redeploy diversity and stimulate a diversification of agricultural systems.

Why? Well for starters studies point to climate change impacts being highly localized. To over-simplify, deploying a new seed technology across an entire region would result in improved adaptation for some, but a failure to capitalize on an opportunity for others. Of course, that’s the flip side of diversity: how to avoid sub-optimal use of diversity? How can we help a farmer to use the most adapted seed, maximizing the opportunity without being over-exposed to risk? Plenty of valid research questions.

Of course, we need to do a lot more and diversity is unfortunately not capable of confronting climate change alone. But I’m interested to hear ideas of how we might operationalise the redeployment of agrobiodiversity, especially in marginal areas.

From Andy Jarvis. If you have ideas, leave a comment.

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