The second United Nations Sustainable Development Goal is a big one: zero hunger. For the U.N., this means, “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.” In the face of unmitigated climate change, this goal becomes even harder to achieve.
“Based on projections of global population growth, 9.7 billion people will need to be sustainably fed by 2050,” says Erik Murchie, professor of applied plant physiology at the University of Nottingham. “Economic growth will enrich this population, which will likely lead to increased overall food consumption.”
The number of people facing hunger and food insecurity has been on the rise since 2015, according to the U.N., with 670 million people projected to be facing hunger by 2030.
The pandemic, conflict, climate change and growing inequalities have exacerbated the situation.
“Maintaining and ensuring food security is a key challenge for mankind that relies on the key pillars of agricultural productivity, access, utilization and stability,” says Martin A. J. Parry, professor emeritus at the University of Lancaster.
“The pillar of crop productivity relies on farmers to produce sufficient biomass to feed livestock, as well as provide feedstock to support the bio-economy.
By 2050, the world will need to double agricultural biomass production, and this will need to be achieved on less land and using fewer resources than ever before.
“At the current rates of biomass yield improvement, the world will fall far short of meeting the future productivity demands, and progress could be further hindered by the complexity of climate change and political and socio-economic challenges.”
There are many challenges facing future-proofing agriculture. Land, healthy soils and water are key to food production, and their growing scarcity makes it imperative to use and manage them sustainably. But even responsible and sustainable farming practices will fail to feed us into the future if crops are pushed past their heat tolerances.
If you can’t stand the heat …
Philippe Nacry, research director at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, explains that increased temperatures from climate change are often negatively correlated with productivity and yield and lead to more frequent and severe heatwaves that affect all crop species:
“Heat stress is defined by temperatures at which optimal plant functioning and homeostasis are impaired, leading to reduced growth, yield, quality and productivity.”
William R. Cline also points out the damage heat can have on crop yields in an article for the International Monetary Fund:
“Beyond a certain range of temperatures, warming tends to reduce yields because crops speed through their development, producing less grain in the process. And higher temperatures also interfere with the ability of plants to get and use moisture.”
Cline is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development. He analyzed six climate models of changes in temperature and rainfall to identify the likely effects of unarrested global warming on agriculture in more than 100 countries.
“In the long list of potential problems from global warming, the risks to world agriculture stand out as among the most important,” he writes.
His study considered climate-model projections into the 2080s to allow sizeable warming and potential damage to materialize but keep the timeframe close enough to the present to elicit public concern. The results weren’t good.
“Whether the impact of climate change is projected by economic or agronomic models, nearly all countries suffer,” Cline writes. “Damage will generally be greater in countries located close to the equator, where temperatures already tend to be close to crop tolerance levels. Country elevation also matters. For example, because of higher elevation and lower average temperatures, Uganda faces smaller losses than Burkina Faso, even though the latter is situated about 10 degrees further north of the equator.”
Not a drop to drink
In many ways, increased temperatures and water scarcity go hand in hand.
“Periods of drought and increased temperature events increasingly co-occur in major crop-producing regions, and reduced water availability can have important consequences for heat-tolerance strategies,” FNIAR’s Nacry says. “We know that water deficit is the abiotic stress that affects crop productivity the most.”
The Middle East is hot and dry. Rainfall is sparse and inconsistent, and the UAE is investing vast quantities of time, effort and money into cloud seeding to increase precipitation. This is a trend likely to continue across the region and around the world as climate change results in longer periods of drought and more unpredictable weather patterns.
Nacry points out that Europe is already coming to terms with this: “Europe already faces a declining water availability and higher variability in precipitation, both in space and time, translating into increased risks of water stress on crops and significantly impacting European agriculture.”
Manipulating local weather is one solution, but researchers are also investigating ways to improve how roots take in and transport water and reduce the number of stomata to regulate water loss in plants.
“Recent studies have shown that roots can sense moisture gradients and direct their growth or position roots preferentially towards increased water availability,” Nacry explains. “Other studies show that plants with shallow rooting systems are more tolerant to drought.
We think this is because a more horizontally distributed root system is a more efficient adaptation to capture water in environments with sparse rainfall. These examples illustrate the power of natural variation approaches for identifying new and unexpected genetic regulators to dissect and possibly improve root hydraulic performance under agricultural conditions.”
Stomata are the tiny pores on leaves and stems. They open and close to control the rate of gas exchange between the plant and the atmosphere. They have been the center of interest for improving drought tolerance, with many studies investigating natural genetic variation or manipulating genes to reduce stomatal density in an attempt to limit water losses. Because stomata are slow to respond to changes in light conditions, they often remain open longer at night, allowing more water to escape. A research study from the University of Glasgow introduced a new ion-channel into the stomata of mustard plants to speed up this response. These plants produced more biomass and conserved more water, especially in the fluctuating light conditions typical of outdoor growth.
Researchers at the University of Montpellier took this concept a step further to force stomata to close at night, reducing nighttime water loss. Since climate projections predict increased levels of transpiration at night relative to the day, breeding plants that can close stomata at night will help plants retain water.
There are places around the world, however, where quantity of water isn’t the problem. Many areas rely on brackish water for irrigation or face increased groundwater salinity due to rising sea levels. Soil salinization is a serious threat to crop productivity. The situation is worst in arid and semi-arid regions, which usually see higher temperatures too. This results in even more water loss and aggravates the effects of salinity.
Turning to crops that can handle the salt and still offer nutritional quality could be a solution for these areas. Jessica Davies, University of Lancaster, certainly thinks so:
“Given that climate-change predictions suggest that future agriculture will be challenged more due to extreme weather conditions and salinity, the potential of halophytic crops should be explored.”
Halophytes can grow in salty soils and have developed traits that allow them to withstand salt stress.
“Quinoa in particular tolerates saline conditions and has a high nutritional quality,” Davies says. “It is also considered the only plant that provides all the essential amino acids, carbohydrates and lipids in proportions ideal for human and animal nutrition. In addition, it can be used for salt sequestration, giving the crop a dual functionality that allows for a more sustainable use of the soil.”
Smart farming or small farming?
Geoffrey Carr writes for the Economist. He says if agriculture is to continue to feed the world, it needs to become more like manufacturing:
“Farms are becoming more like factories: tightly controlled operations for turning out reliable products, immune as far as possible from the vagaries of nature. Technological improvements will boost farmers’ profits, by cutting costs and increasing yields, and should also benefit consumers in the form of lower prices. In the longer run, though, they may help provide the answer to an increasingly urgent question: How can the world be fed in the future without putting irreparable strain on the Earth’s soils and oceans?”
Carr is all for the concept of smart farming, which refers to managing farms using modern information and communication technologies to increase the quantity and quality of products. Sensors, software and robotics connect with advanced data analytics to streamline strategic decisions for an individual plant or the farm as a whole without the farmer even needing to step foot in the field.
IMAGE: FreepikQUINOA: The future proof crop?
Quinoa is an edible seed that comes in various colors. It’s been cultivated for about 5,000 years, and it looks to be around much longer still: Many researchers consider quinoa the food of the future. Read more›››
“Agriculture has undergone yield-enhancing shifts in the past, including mechanization before the Second World War and the introduction of new crop varieties and agricultural chemicals in the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s,” Carr says. “Yet yields of important crops such as rice and wheat have now stopped rising in some intensively farmed parts of the world, a phenomenon called yield plateauing. To go beyond them will require improved technology.”
University of Lancaster’s Parry believes one way to achieve this is to increase photosynthesis of major crops like wheat. Photosynthesis is responsible for more than 90 percent of all biomass on Earth, but left alone, photosynthesis is relatively inefficient. This is because of the nature of rubisco, the enzyme that helps convert carbon dioxide into sugar. About 20 percent of the time, rubisco reacts with oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, reducing the rate of photosynthesis. Parry is working on improving rubisco’s catalytic properties to increase photosynthetic rates. Better rates equal better yields.
Amanda Cavanagh is working on the same concept with the University of Essex and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. She says as temperatures rise, rubisco has a harder time distinguishing between carbon dioxide and oxygen. When rubisco reacts with oxygen, the plant starts a process called photorespiration, which is energetically expensive and reduces yield. Cavanagh’s research focuses on genetically manipulating this photorespiration to help crops withstand temperature stresses and mitigate yield losses.
Cavanagh proved her concept in tobacco plants, which are common experimental subjects because they are easy to work with and results can be seen quickly. Research is underway to use the same genetic manipulation in food crops like potatoes and soybeans.
Shangchiri Reimi, founder of agricultural-services provider My Farming Days, says the UAE is turning to the future of agriculture – one filled with innovative technologies, diverse crops and a skilled workforce:
“The UAE’s agricultural landscape has been synonymous with towering date palms and vast stretches of sand for centuries,” Reimi writes in a post on LinkedIn. “While dates remain a cherished symbol of Emirati heritage, the story is changing. The UAE’s agricultural sector has witnessed impressive growth in recent years. In 2023 alone, the sector contributed AED 3.5 billion to the national GDP with this growth fueled by a strategic focus on diversification and a wider range of crops and technologies. The vision for the future is clear: a UAE where date palms stand alongside greenhouses teeming with exotic vegetables, fish farms thrive in the desert, and skilled farmers leverage technology to maximize yields.”
Improved technology is all well and good but a team of researchers including Wageningen University’s Ken Giller points out that farming systems around the world are dominated by small family farms, with more than 70 percent of farms in India and Africa considered “ultra-small” at less than 0.05 hectares. Giller says future-proof farming may require a reversal of a global trend toward increasing specialization to a recoupling of arable and livestock farming, not least for the resilience it provides:
“Smallholder farms will remain an important source of food and income, and a social safety net in the absence of alternative livelihood security. But with limited possibilities for smallholders to ‘step-up,’ the agricultural engine of growth appears to be broken.”
Peterson Institute’s Cline is also skeptical that technological developments will swoop in to save the day:
“There are those who argue that rapid technological change will raise agricultural yields so much by late this century that any reduction caused by global warming would easily be more than offset. But technological change is a false panacea.”
Farmer or plant scientist, everyone involved in the production of enough food for a growing population is combatting major challenges in the face of climate change. To future-proof agriculture, our current ways of doing things will need to be reimagined — and soon.
IMAGE: FreepikMenus of the future could look very different. Although this list is only a slice of the emerging portfolio of food solutions, here are three ingredients we might see more of:
Jellyfish
Human-driven changes to the oceans may be bad news for most marine life, but jellyfish stand to benefit. Jellyfish prefer warmer water: They experience a boost in metabolism, growing faster, breeding faster and living longer. And as the oceans warm, more areas become habitable for the more than 3,000 species of jellyfish we know about. Some societies already eat jellyfish, but as the organisms become more abundant, populations around the world could turn to eating them too. They are nutrient-rich and offer a similar taste and texture profile to oysters.
Insects
Entomophagy is already practiced around the world. Many insect species are rich in protein, vitamins and minerals, and there’s plenty of them. Insect farming requires significantly less land, water and energy and the animals can be fed on fruit and vegetable waste. Cricket flour is already commercially available, but the ”ick” factor may prove difficult for some consumers.
Seaweed
Jessica Davies, University of Lancaster, thinks seaweed is a future staple beyond sushi. “Seaweeds are used for direct human consumption as a vegetable, a source of flavoring and as a thickener in Asian cuisines,” she says.
The algae are often rich in minerals and vitamins. They can be farmed quickly and don’t require additional land use: They’re sea “weeds.”
“Despite the major potential that seaweeds offer, they remain largely understudied and currently still relatively few molecular tools are available to study and possibly engineer them,” Davies says. “Investment in the characterization of their biology, reproduction, growth and development would be advantageous to further leverage their potential and allow aquatic species to become a competitive resource.
