Climate Adaptation and Developing Climate-Resilient Crops

Droughts, floods, and other extreme events are making farming more challenging and threatening crop yields worldwide.

Adapting to it would entail relocating crops to more favourable environments, potentially thousands of miles away, where they can grow significantly in tropical or equatorial regions, where extremely high temperatures could decrease crop yields.

A study by Sultan, Defrance, and Iizumi, published on the “Nature” website, finds that the effects of climate change have already caused significant crop yield losses in West Africa. Researchers used two ensembles of 100 historical climate simulations of sorghum and millet yields for two types of climate conditions, derived from an atmospheric general circulation model and crop models, one with climate change and the other without climate change, from 2000 to 2009.

They find that the simulations with climate change – that is, with a warming of 1°C, will bring more frequent heat and rainfall extremes will reduce the regional average yield by 10 to 20% for millet and 5 – 15% for sorghum which is equivalent to USD 2.33 to 4.20 billion for millet, and USD 0.73 to 2.17 billion for sorghum.

According to the study, findings will serve as a basis for loss and damage due to climate change and help estimate the cost of adapting crop production systems to climate change.

To read the entire study, click the link in the “Source” section.

Helping Farmers Adapt to climate change through climate-resilient crops

An article from TechCrunch shared an exciting development in crop genetics that can identify traits in plants that make them resilient to heat, drought, and cold at a fraction of the cost and time compared with other big biotech companies, thanks to a novel Artificial Intelligence approach.

Avalo, a start-up ‘biological production and crop development’ company, uses “AI-powered genome analysis that can reduce the time and money it takes to breed hardier plants for this hot century.”

The company was founded by two friends: Brendan Collins, the founder and CEO, a cell biologist and programmer, and Mariano Alvarez, an evolutionary and computational biologist.

According to the article, large seed and agriculture companies invest a significant amount of time, which can take decades and cost millions of dollars, to find the desired trait in plants that makes them more resistant to heat, drought, flooding, and insects. And this is where Avalo steps in.

The company has built a model for simulating the effects of changes to a plant’s genome, which they claim can reduce that 15-year lead time to two or three years and the cost by a similar ratio (Codeway, 2021).

Creating better versions of crops in a shorter timeframe and at lower costs could help farmers increase their yields and profits, making them more resilient to climate change.

Collins said:

“The idea was to create a much more realistic model for the genome that’s more evolutionarily aware. That is, a system that models the genome and its genes, incorporating more biological and evolutionary context. With a better model, you get far fewer false positives on genes associated with a trait, because it rules out far more as noise, unrelated genes, minor contributors and so on.”

Coldeway (2021) explains more:

Avalo’s system ruled out more than 90% of the genes that would have had to be individually investigated. They had high confidence that these 32 genes were not only related but also causal, having a genuine effect on the trait.

This was borne out by brief “knockout” studies, where a particular gene is blocked and its impact is studied. Avalo calls its method “gene discovery via informationless perturbations,” or GDIP.

To learn more about what the Avalo co-founders are doing, visit the Avalo website: https://www.avalo.ai/