The InterDependent

In the birthplace of the potato, things are heating up. Over the past decade, the Quechua farmers working at the El Parque de la Papa, outside Cusco, Peru, started noticing that the potato varieties they used to grow at lower altitudes can now only be cultivated much higher up the mountainside. “Temperate zones in the mountains are moving upwards—which is to say it’s getting warmer," says Shakeel Bhatti, Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Climate change, he says, is pushing temperatures up—and now he, his colleagues and the potato park farmers are looking for potato varieties that can adapt.

The potato park farmers are not alone. As international negotiators attended a UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa earlier this month, crops around the world were already feeling the effects of changing temperatures. The higher temperatures, increased flooding, prolonged droughts and more extreme weather that climate change brings are expected to have incredibly negative impacts on global agriculture—while global population continues to rise. By 2050, in fact, climate change will impact worldwide farming to such a degree that the International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that prices for staples like wheat and maize could rise by 20 to 100 percent from 2010 levels. The number of malnourished children in developing countries stands to grow by at least 8 percent relative to a world without climate change.

The impacts will hit farmers in developing countries, those least able to adapt to changing climatic conditions, hardest. "Agriculture is more vulnerable to climate change than any other sector," South African President Jacob Zuma said at the summit. "Without strong adaptation measures, climate change could reduce food crop production by 10 to 20 percent by the 2050s, with more severe losses in Africa."

A 2009 study predicted that at least half of the farmland in a majority of African countries will have experienced climate change by 2050. Thomas Osborne, an officer in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Seed and Plant Genetic Resources Service, worries that the trend has already started: “Already [by the late 1980s] the rainfall in parts of Senegal had gone down by 20 percent, and this had already started shifts in production systems,” he said. "A lot of the African countries are very concerned, because they’re already seeing these things happen."

The best way to overcome these challenges would be to prevent or mitigate climate change, but it may be too late for that. Instead, farmers worldwide will have to adapt. And one of the best tools at their disposal is knowledge. New climates in Africa aren’t necessarily new to the world as a whole; most of those countries predicted to have unfamiliar climates will end up looking a lot like other countries do today. But some, primarily those in parts of the Sahel, will experience climates comparable to only a very few other countries. A handful of others actually currently feature the sort of climates that will be common by 2050.

Worldwide, 1.5 million samples of plant genetic material are held in a network of 1,750 gene banks. That genetic material, which includes seeds or cuttings from both newly developed and traditional food crops, is the potential raw material for adapting agriculture to climate change. "We can think of existing varieties as a collection of genes that have already proven themselves in a particular location or locations. So one of the tools to think about for dealing with climate change is different combinations of these genes," explains Gerald Nelson, a senior research fellow at IFPRI.

The trouble is, the countries with climates that might be most prevalent by 2050 are poorly represented in major seed banks, which can range from massive underground vaults like that on the Norwegian island of Svalbard to much more informal community banks. A global network of researchers and policy experts working in fields and international labs is now trying to fill the gap.

Cataloguing the world’s crops and plant species is in many ways a battle against time. Twenty-two percent of the wild relatives of important food crops could disappear by 2050 due to climate change, according to the FAO. Already, 75 percent of crop diversity has been lost just in the past century, primarily due to modern industrial agricultural practices.

The banks, under the auspices of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (which commemorated its 10th anniversary last month), are intended to safeguard the remaining diversity of crops from further threats—especially since this diversity has become a potential tool in climate change adaptation. Working from the samples catalogued in the banks, farmers and researchers are hoping to develop breeds of key crops that will grow with less rainfall and will flourish despite longer floods and hotter summers. As Bhatti notes, "Work on climate change and climate adaptation of food crops is central—absolutely central—to the work of the international treaty."

Once species are catalogued in the lab, the work moves to the field, where scientists are testing, breeding and transplanting crops that might help feed a warmer world. The potato farm back in Peru is one place where this work is taking place. But the potato project is just one of 11 such initiatives in 21 developing countries and four global regions. The work is supported by the treaty's Benefit-Sharing Fund, which promotes information and technology transfer between communities as well as the sustainable use of plant genetic resources. While the potato park in Peru reintroduces native potato varieties and adapts them for higher, cooler elevations, farmers in Tanzania, for example, are returning to local cereal varieties. Other efforts to breed our way out of climate change-caused malnourishment are underway under the umbrella of a number of other organizations, including the Gates Foundation, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, U.N.- and national-level agencies or other private or regionally focused centers.

Nelson says that for the major crops—such as wheat, maize and rice—researchers have come "about halfway there" in understanding how they respond to different climactic conditions, and thus how they would be expected to fare under different climate-change scenarios. "But what we tend to do is look at their performance where they’re currently grown rather than looking at their performance where they’re not currently grown—which is what might happen to the places they’re grown now," he says. "So we need to do more of this testing, and we can do this today—at least in terms of projecting as far out as 2050."

In addition to this strategy of crop relocation, crops are being bred to withstand droughts or floods or extreme high or low temperatures. They are also being bred to simply grow and mature faster, which FAO Osborn says is much more common and useful for farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa. "Rice that used to grow in 130 days can now produce a crop in, say, 110 days, so it uses less water and matures quicker and avoids some drought-caused problems that way," he says.

Even after improved varieties are found, however, there is still the problem of getting those better-adapted seeds to the farmers who will use and multiply them. Whereas in industrialized countries seeds primarily come from the private sector, in developing countries, farmers either rely on seed from the previous year's harvest, from an informal market or from regional research centers. The FAO works to strengthen those "seed systems" that connect seed developers to the farmers. "Climate change puts even more emphasis and attention on how you get better adapted varieties out to farmers, because the varieties they’ve been using for the past decades may no longer be adapted to the agro-ecologies they have," says Osborn. “So along with other technologies, in many ways the seed systems are central to adaptation to climate change."

The combination of all these tactics—utilizing genetic diversity to breed more climate-change resistant crops, improving irrigation, land and nutrient use and greater information exchange—will require significant public investment to make an impact. At least $7 billion per year in additional funding needs to be invested in research, rural infrastructure and irrigation improvements to help agriculture adapt to changing climates and prevent an exacerbation of global malnutrition, according to 2009 IFPRI estimates.

Part of this funding could come from a Green Climate Fund, through which industrialized countries finance actions to combat the effects of climate change in developing countries. Negotiators at Durban vowed to make the fund—which would receive a large part of the annual $100 billion richer countries have promised poorer countries at recent climate talks—operational by 2020. Still, whether, when and how those funding pledges will actually be fulfilled remains to be seen.

For now, the world still has time to adapt to climate change by doing the necessary research and developing the crops future generations will rely upon. But as famine caused by extreme droughts in the Horn of Africa, unprecedented floods wiping out fields in Pakistan, and unusual heat waves slashing crop yields in Russia have shown, climate change is already seriously impacting agriculture and exacerbating food security issues in an increasingly crowded world.

Back in Durban, Zuma and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan offered one more hope for adaption: a system of "climate-smart" agriculture. This initiative, which the World Bank is promoting, would allow Western polluters to purchase carbon offsets in the form of tree-planting or composting and mulching on developing-world farms. The result, it is hoped, would be richer soils that would help farmers' crops withstand drought, floods and extreme temperatures.

Regardless of whether these specific initiatives succeed, the attention now being paid to agriculture and climate change is certainly cause for hope. "There was no one at Durban who would say adaptation isn’t something we should do, which is an observation you probably couldn't have made five or 10 years ago,” said Nelson. "The cup is half full in that regard, but we definitely need more funding."