Our planet is changing
Climate change is already impacting how we produce food on Earth.
It will change where we produce food too.
As the planet heats up, the parts of the world that currently grow most of our food will become hotter and more arid, and the global share of food production will likely have to move northwards. But for this to happen, Northern countries also need to develop new crop varieties that can cope with higher temperatures. One solution to this problem is to take crops that are currently grown at warmer latitudes and adapt them for growth in the North. However, due to the very different light environments in Northern countries we will need to engineer plants that can produce higher yields under short days, longer dawns and dusks, and higher temperatures.
The warming of the planet over the last century (Source: NASA)
We need to create crops that can adapt to new geographic areas
Previous research by us and others has found that plants use their circadian clock to sense changes in their geographical environment, such as differences in light intensity and quality to shape their growth and development. As climate change forces agriculture to expand into more Northern latitudes, we need to understand how the clock functions in different environments and how we can tweak it to engineer future-proof crops.
The planet’s agricultural zone is forecast to expand Northwards over the next fifty years.