Bad luck and Climate Change

The melting snows of Mount Kilimanjaro; the disappearing glaciers of the Himalayas and Greenland; the collapsing ice shelves of the Arctic and Antarctic, the drying up of Lake Chad (now 5% of what it was 40 years ago); the severe droughts afflicting Australia – all of these may represent just a spate of bad luck in the eyes of climate change skeptics.

But persistent bad luck, otherwise known as a trend, has a way of creating real problems that only mitigation and adaptation can resolve. With "reversion to the mean" highly unlikely, relying on good luck seems a foolish gamble. The only prudent course is to prepare for climate change .

Preparation, after all, is the best way we have of making our own luck. As the golfing legend, Arnold Palmer once observed: "It's a funny thing, the more I practice the luckier I get."

The Need to Adapt – the Means to Adapt

Preparation for climate change is now urgently needed, and the time available to prepare is rapidly diminishing.

Agriculture is important to efforts to mitigate climate change – less than fully productive agriculture spurs further land clearing and greater use of fossil fuels, for example.

More importantly, agriculture is essential to efforts to adapt to climate change – to continue to feed ourselves as the world changes.

Climate change will create dramatically new and different growing conditions for crops. If agriculture is going to help us cope with climate change, instead of becoming another victim, it too will have to change. Most people, with less thought than reason, simply assume that agriculture will adapt. This assumption permeates popular press coverage of climate change. But we will need to have an adaptation strategy for agricultural crops, if agriculture is to be part of an adaptation strategy for climate change.

We either get agriculture ready for climate change, or as Jared Diamond has documented in his most recent book, we watch civilizations collapse.

The most common misconception about how agriculture will adapt is that we will shift existing crop varieties from current production areas to new spots with more amenable temperatures as global warming sets in. But it is not going to be that simple. Crop varieties cannot easily pull up roots and emigrate.

A crop variety is adapted to a particular area not simply because it tolerates the average temperature there during the growing season. There are a myriad of points at which a crop variety interacts with and is affected by the natural environment in addition to temperature. Here are four examples of ‘emigration restrictions’:

• Photoperiod. Day length cycles vary by latitude and by season, of course. In many crops seed germination and flowering are "photoperiod sensitive." Unadapted crops and crop varieties are likely to germinate, flower, or set seed too soon or too late to survive. Additionally, shifts in production areas imply changes in amount of sunlight due to the foregoing as well as to differences in cloud cover.
• Water. Both timing and quantity are important, as every farmer knows. Climate change is forecast to affect each profoundly. In the Journal of Hydrometerology, the UK Meteorological Office predicts that "extreme drought" conditions will increase tenfold by 2100, a clear indication of the need to conserve crop diversity in order to breed more drought tolerant varieties.
• Soil. Move a crop variety to a new area in response to an increase in local temperatures, and one will likely encounter a different kind of soil that may well affect plant health, yield, etc. Additionally, climate change will have an impact on all soils (e.g., moisture levels and thus salinity, organic matter, soil life) to which crop varieties will have to be adapted regardless of whether areas of production shift.
• Pests/diseases. Transfer of crops to new production areas will alter the mix of pests, diseases and the natural control systems for each presenting new challenges to crops and plant breeders and added importance to genebank collections.

Transfers of existing crop varieties from one region to another may solve the temperature problem only to introduce new, equally grave obstacles to crop survival.

Crop varieties will not simply chase the thermometer and relocate to growing areas with the proper temperature. Plant breeders and farmers will need to fashion new varieties with new traits and combinations of traits to be in tune with the changed environment, both natural and cultural.

Fortunately, the diversity needed to address these challenges exists; it's just not yet secured. Some rice varieties, for instance, can grow in 6 meters of water, while others are capable of managing in semi–arid conditions with considerably less than a meter of annual rainfall. Different potato varieties grow from below sea level to over 4,000 meters, from the Arctic Circle to southern Africa.

Tomorrow's climate ready varieties will need to draw on such diversity if they are to adapt successfully to new environments.

Crop diversity is our principal resource, the raw material for agricultural adaptation. This is why conserving the crop diversity found in genebanks is so important. It's also why we are working with Stanford University to explore how genebank collections can best be managed and utilized in the context of climate change.

And, it's why we'll be returning in future letters to examine the ways in which crop diversity (and the Trust) can help the international community mitigate and adapt to one of the greatest challenges ever faced by our species or any other – climate change.

We are extremely grateful to Eva Barrett at The Red Queen, a handbag and accessories company which sells to stores in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Australia. Eva contacted us to say that she sees a close tie with the values of the company and the mission of the Trust, and she has pledged to donate 5% of post–tax profits to the Trust. Not only are we appreciative of her generosity, we are also heartened that the significance and value of crop diversity is drawing in donors from ever more varied sectors and backgrounds

The Chicago Board of Trade's Cathryn Lyall is competing against eleven other international business leaders in a year–long "Investor of the Year" competition sponsored by Shattered Magazine. The magazine will donate $12,000 to the charity identified by the winner, the person whose mock portfolio is tops at the end of the year. Cathryn has designated the Trust for the prize because, as she puts it, "the Trust's vital work underpins agriculture, and therefore the existence of our markets." It's still early in the game, but Cathryn is doing great. Cheer for her and follow her progress at:
http://www.shatteredmagazine.com/portfolio_picks_new.html

Chastened but unbowed. Spam filters blocked some of you from seeing the last issue of Crop Diversity Topics. We think it was because of two particular words in the first sentence. For obvious reasons we will not repeat them. If you missed "Crops in Collision" or are dying to know what the two words were, click here. Apologies to our readers for the inconvenience.

Lots of travel for me at the moment: to Ethiopia for a meeting of genebank directors of the major international research centers (CGIAR) as well as the Ethiopian national facility; to England for a meeting to plan programme implementation; to ICARDA in Syria later in February to finalize strategies and plans to conserve global chickpea, fababean, lentil and lathyrus diversity with experts in these crops; to Svalbard (near the North Pole) in March to advance plans for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault; and then on to Russia to lay the groundwork for securing certain of the Vavilov collections in St. Petersburg, the most famous of all crop diversity collections.