Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf, known for his concern for the environment, will convene a Royal Colloquium on 'Past Climate Change: Human Survival Strategies' this week. The King has invited 10 international scholars to join him in Greenland for the event. The Trust's Executive Director, Cary Fowler, will be among that number, presenting an address on 'Crop Diversity: Neolithic Foundations for Agriculture's Future Adaptation to Climate Change'. The text of his address will be published later in the year by AMBIO, the Journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. This issue of Crop Diversity Topics provides a short synopsis.

Some 13,000 years ago, our ancestors began to make a slow transition from a predominantly hunting and gathering existence to one dependent on agriculture. Scholars have long speculated about why, after so long on earth, humans began to make this momentous shift almost simultaneously in different places around the world from Asia to the Near East and Africa, to Central America.

Different explanations have been offered. Indeed there were surely multiple reasons. One thing is certain: in the relatively short period of approximately 10,000 years, people domesticated potatoes in the Andes, maize in Central America, sorghum in Africa, wheat in the Near East, rice in Asia, and a host of other crops in each region.

Climate change was at least the backdrop if not one of the catalysts. Some have speculated that the rapid cooling event, the "Younger Dryas" from 13,000 to 11,500 years ago, following the end of the last major Ice Age 15,000 years ago, served to concentrate human populations just as it made hunting and gathering less productive, leading to increased attention to and dependency on cultivating plants.

Another thing is certain: people and plants were on the move.

Climate Change Déjà Vu

The entire Near East system (barley, wheat, pea, lentil, vetch, faba bean, flax, vine fruits) spread along shores of the Mediterranean, along the Danube and down the Rhine, east to northern India, and south across Arabia, Yemen and into Ethiopia. By 4,000 years ago, it had made it to China.

The "Columbian Exchange," post-1492, in which New World crops such as maize, beans, squash and tomato, crossed the Atlantic, and Near Eastern and other crops were taken to the Americas, marked another chapter in the globalization of agriculture and adaptation of crops to new environments and climates.

Just take a look at this map showing the distribution of cassava, which originated in the Amazon, and is now grown across three continents (with Africa now producing three times the amount grown in Latin America).

Credit: Robert Hijmans, IRRI

An even more extreme example is maize, which originated in southern Mexico and is now grown in almost every country in the world. Talk about climate change!

This period, from the beginnings of agricultural domestication to our time, delineates the most dramatic period of climate change ever seen - from a crop perspective.

Even if the global climate were not changing, domesticated crops faced dramatic "climate change" as they moved with people - as rice, for example, came to be grown in more than 110 countries, from its birthplace along the Yangtze River to fields along the Mississippi River, from humid tropical rainforests to mangrove swamps and arid deserts. Imagine the change in climate and environment soybean experienced as it journeyed from China to Brazil, as Andean potatoes encountered Irish mist, and as maize came to be the staple crop in eastern and southern Africa.

To some extent, the climate change we are now confronting must seem like déjà vu to our crops. But there are several differences that play both to our own strengths as well as to our weaknesses.

The climate change that crops effectively encountered in ancient times, as they moved with people, was gradual compared with the speed of change currently forecasted. It took several thousand years, for example, for wheat to move from the Near East to China, plenty of time for natural selection to facilitate the adjustment. A similar or even greater magnitude of change might now unfold within decades, posing an unprecedented challenge of adaptation for agriculture and society. How will we cope not just with enormity of the change but also with its rapidity?

Half of the solution lies in the hands of our plant breeders, whose expertise can be used to produce new crop varieties in an evolutionary blink of the eye.

The other half? The remaining crop diversity available for use.

Remarkably, we have a living historical record of crop adaptation to climate change, dating back to Neolithic times, a virtual library of life. The contents of our genebanks - some 1.5 million distinct samples - are what remain of a 13,000-year experiment, of the interaction of crops with environment, climate and culture. Earlier cultures had no access to this wider legacy - and so for example a change to a warmer, drier climate spelled doom for Mesopotamia some 4000 years ago, and the collapse of Mayan civilization coincided with the driest period in the history of the region. Neither civilization had the ability to adapt its crops - and neither coped with changes in climate.

If we are wise enough to conserve these collections, we will have a treasure chest of the very traits that crops used in the past when they successfully confronted climate change - the traits they will need in the future to adapt again to new climates and environments. This is the message from the Neolithic. Like a note from the past washed up on shore, it's found in bottles - and packets - in genebanks around the world.

The UK's Department for International Development (DFID) has announced a £10 million donation (c.$20 million) to the Trust's endowment fund. The announcement, timed for last month's International Biodiversity Day, makes the UK our largest country donor. See the complete list of our donors here.

Blasting and tunneling has begun at the site of the future Svalbard Global Seed Vault. You'll find video and still photos of the work on our website. I shall be leading a tour of international media to Svalbard in August, to inspect the final stages of construction. If you are interested in joining us, contact Jeff Haskins at: jhaskins@burnesscommunications.com

The Trust has been in the news a great deal of late. Click here for links to media coverage.