As our climate changes, natural disasters follow. Agricultural systems are being disrupted, with crop failures becoming all too common. Owen Cumming wonders what might be left for us to eat in a climate-changed future. This article was originally published in the Cosmos Print Magazine in December 2024.
Entire fields of crops, flooded. Landscapes, stretching out to the horizon, inundated by torrential rains. A season’s worth of food, drowned in the wake of the storms.
That was the scene across much of northern New South Wales in 2022, when destructive, record-breaking rainfall flooded the entire region, costing hundreds of millions of dollars and devastating livelihoods. Fast-forward just one year and those same flood-affected fields were bone dry amid a drought that withered and desiccated the new season’s crops.
This kind of story isn’t unique to NSW, or even to Australia. As climate change gathers momentum, disastrous climatic events are happening all over the world. Everywhere, the established systems of agricultural production are being disrupted by unseasonable, unpredictable, and unmerciful weather.
We’re drawn to the plight of those who lost so much in the wake of these calamities, the farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed, but there’s a larger concern to address. If crop failures are beginning to happen with greater intensity and regularity as climate change takes hold, what are we going to eat?
Food security under climate change
“Climate change is a huge global challenge, there’s no doubt about it that it will affect food security,” says Professor Prem Bhalla, a plant biotechnologist from the University of Melbourne and expert in crop plant biology.
Food security isn’t always at the forefront of our minds when it comes to climate change, especially living in a country like Australia where we produce far more food than we can eat. Nevertheless, intense heatwaves, drought, floods, and storms are set to take a heavy toll on food production around the world, making climate change one of the greatest threats to global food security.
As is often the case, the poorest and most vulnerable among us are likely to be the ones most affected. “A farmer losing the crop means people don’t have food to eat, and the prices will go higher, but it has a very downstream social effect, both directly and indirectly,” says Bhalla.
One of the major concerns is that people with lower incomes won’t be able to afford good quality, nutritious food.
“It affects your decision making, your nutrition, and your health,” says Bhalla.
It’s estimated that we’ll need to produce 60% to 100% more food globally by the year 2050 to meet worldwide demand. So, how can we do that with an agricultural system that’s constantly being undermined by extreme climate variability? Put simply, we can’t yet.
“What we can do with the situation at hand is prepare our crop plants. We can prepare our food supply for extreme changes,” says Bhalla.
We need to adapt our agricultural systems as conditions change. We need crops that can survive in the harshest of conditions, harvests that can take a beating and keep on feeding.
We need climate-changed foods.
Easier said than done…
Historically, the process of altering a crop to make it more resistant to things like heat or disease, is a painstaking one. Breeders select the individual plants that best exhibit the desired trait, cross pollinate, grow new seed from those plants, then repeat the process, over and over, until the trait is sufficiently prominent. Not only does this process involve a lot of trial and error, it also takes an eye-wateringly long time.
“We can make our crops tolerant to these sudden changes, but it’s easier said than done, because breeding takes time,” says Bhalla.
The crops we have today, have been selectively bred over hundreds, if not thousands of years, with the first cultivation of wheat taking place 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Cresent of Western Asia and North Africa. We don’t have 10,000 years, but luckily technology has advanced a little since the days of ancient Mesopotamia.
Tweaking
The last 10 years (2014–2023) have been the 10 hottest individual years in recorded history so the importance of finding ways to prepare crops for extreme heatwaves really can’t be overstated. For Bhalla, the answers might be found hidden within the genomes of existing crops.
“Using gene editing we can tweak the plant’s genome to have more, or better expression of certain traits,” says Bhalla.
Making ‘tweaks’ to plant genomes might sound like the ominous premise of bad sci-fi movie, but Bhalla’s research has managed to successfully tweak the genes of soybean plants to help them survive heatwave events.
“We used a master switch which senses the temperature in the plant and lets it respond,” says Bhalla.
By increasing the expression of genes that sense when the plant is over-heating, this ‘master switch’ can prompt a stronger and faster production of protective heat-shock proteins and antioxidants. Potentially, this could allow soybean crops to withstand extreme heatwaves and still produce food.
Despite the complexity of the task, gene editing has near endless applications in preparing food crops for climate change. Like in Japan, where researchers from Nagoya University have manipulated 2 genes in rice that allow the stalks to grow at up to 25cm per day, keeping them above the rising floodwaters when the plant becomes inundated.
Similar genes have been identified in sugarcane and barley, providing hope that various flood resistant crops might be produced in the same way.
But as exciting as these advancements are, creating a holistically climate resistant agriculture system is still an arduous task. The genomes of every single crop plant are different, so when biotechnologists are looking for ways to make them climate change resilient, every solution is different.
“Brassica is very different to wheat, and wheat is very different to canola… there’s no magic formula,” says Bhalla.
For each new plant species, each new trait, each new threat, and each new environment, the process of searching for resistant genes begins anew. But sometimes there simply isn’t the raw material to work with.
Modifying
“To breed heat tolerance, you need a heat tolerant germ plasm, but in canola there’s no such thing… so you need to change your focus. The only way of doing it is by the GM approach,” says Bhalla.
When the genome within a plant fails to provide a viable option for creating climate resilience, biotechnologists sometimes need to bring in outside help. Rather than tweaking the existing genome of a plant, genetic modification (GM) takes desirable genes from other organisms and inserts them into a new host, imbuing them with a tailored range of new traits.
Regulations on GM foods differ between countries, but all over the world genetic modification has been used to make food more nutritious, higher yielding and more resistant to disease. Yet, GM foods have faced more than a little controversy over the years. “Frankenstein foods” have been a point of contentious debate for decades, with people arguing whether they are safe for consumption, environmentally sound, or even a moral violation.
But the simple fact is, GM foods are already common in agriculture and have been for years. GM crops were first commercially used in Australia nearly 30 years ago, with cotton farmers opting to use varieties that had been genetically modified for greater pest resistance.
Today, as climate change looms, intense droughts are going to worsen in up to 84% of world’s croplands and GM foods are playing an integral role in preparing our agricultural systems. Genes from drought tolerant species such as mouse-ear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), have already been introduced into the DNA of many crop plants, such as soybean, maize and wheat, to help them survive as water scarcity becomes a major agricultural issue.
Adapting
Gene editing and genetic modification will be invaluable in preparing our crops for climate change, but there’s another approach that gets less attention. What if we do things the other way around?
Every variety of crop that we grow today was once bred from a wild ancestor. So, rather than trying to change an existing crop, why don’t researchers take an already climate resilient plant and adapt it for use in agriculture?
Dr Vanessa Melino from the University of Newcastle is a plant physiologist and molecular biologist who specialises in looking for new species that can be domesticated as food crops. In particular, Dr Melino’s research is focused on finding highly salt-resistant crops.
Soil salinity in agricultural areas is caused by a combination of human activities and climate factors that are worsened by climate change.
As land is cleared for agriculture, groundwater – that would have been kept at low levels by deep rooted trees – rises to the surface. The water carries salts from deep in the ground up into the topsoil. Without regular rainfall, the topsoil’s moisture is evaporated, and what’s left is some decidedly ‘over-seasoned’ soil in which very little will grow.
“In some salt affected areas they can no longer do any cropping… they’ve actually just had to abandon it, and the only vegetation in that area now is some halophytes [salt-tolerant plants],” says Melino.
Melino’s research is exploring the possibilities on offer from these halophytes, which have already adapted to inhospitable salty soils.
“I came across these species called Salicornia. They’re sort of distant relatives of quinoa or sugar beet, but they grow in much more extreme environments. We find them around the edges of inland salt lakes and around coastal areas where they get a regular wash of sea water,” says Melino.
Salicornia is what’s known as an obligate halophyte, which means not only can it survive in salty conditions, but it needs salt water to complete its lifecycle. Salicornia stems are already eaten in many countries, but it’s rarely cultivated on any kind of commercial scale.
Melino has realised that the real value of Salicornia isn’t in eating the stems, but in cultivating it as an oil seed crop.
“We found that the oil content and protein content [in the seeds] was far above what had been reported in the literature, and it was made up of some really good fat compositions, that might be good for cardiovascular health.”
Currently, Melino is still at the stage of editing Salicornia’s genome, crossbreeding, and testing the yield stability across different environments, but if successful this research could provide a viable seed oil alternative for desperately salt affected areas, like the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia.
“I see this as an option for countries with severe saltwater intrusion like the south of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Egypt, and dryland salinity found across Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
“I would love to see Australia at the forefront of these global projects… I’ve had a lot of contact with Western Australian farmers who are very keen to trial these species,” says Melino.
“Climate change is going to affect our food supply very extensively and very severely. And when food supply is affected, every one of us is affected, because soon, one way or another, everyone has to pay, whether it’s food prices or food availability,” says Bhalla.
The research that’s been done so far is only the beginning, and new technologies need to be coupled with smarter and more adaptive agricultural techniques. But it seems inevitable that biotechnologies, gene editing, and genetic modification are going to play an important role in producing climate-changed foods.