Review: Heat-resilient crops are within reach — given enough time and money
Laboratory and field experiments have repeatedly shown that modifying the process of photosynthesis or the physical characteristics of plants can make crops more resilient to hotter temperatures. Scientists can now alter the abundance or orientation of leaves, change leaf chemistry to improve heat tolerance and adjust key steps in the process of photosynthesis to overcome bottlenecks, researchers report in a new review in the journal Science.
While these changes can overcome some of the losses experienced from rising global temperatures, they are not easy to implement at the scale that will be needed to keep the world fed, the authors said.
“There are real opportunities to address temperature increases, to future-proof the crop against rising temperatures,” said Stephen Long , who wrote the review with Donald Ort and Carl Bernacchi, all professors of crop sciences and of plant biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “It isn’t an impossibility. But it’s going to mean significant, very significant effort.”