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By Dnyaneshwari Haware ’23
Staff Writer
The impact of climate change can be seen in everything around us, from the loss of habitats to the migration of animals and plant species — even the crops planted and growing on farms. Climate change has already destroyed many agricultural lands through frequent floods, increased forest fires and intensified droughts. This is made more worrisome by research concluding that crop species are becoming sensitive to the increase in average surface temperatures due to global warming. Wheat, which is considered the foundation of life in much of the world, is predicted to suffer the most from rising temperatures, and countries where it is predominantly grown will be the most impacted and least equipped to cope. Rising temperatures are likely to impact more species upon which life depends. A possible solution that has emerged is modifying plant species to adapt to the climate, a practice known as climate-adapted plant breeding.
Climate-adapted plant breeding uses existing or old varieties of plants to breed new varieties so they will be adapted to current and future climate conditions. Recently, a research team from the Technical University of Munich was able to show that material from gene banks can be used to improve traits in the maize plant using a combination of new molecular and statistical methods. A prerequisite for this is the preservation of old and present species through proper storage and seed handling. Seed banks, or seed vaults, have emerged as a solution that preserves genetic diversity by providing the necessary conditions for the longevity of seeds. Seeds are stored in low temperatures that keep them dormant until they are needed for replanting.
One of the largest seed vaults is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the Spitsbergen island of Norway above the Arctic Circle. It is frequently called the Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault because it contains over a million seed types from all over the world and, should a global catastrophe occur, the vault’s collection would allow for a theoretical restart to world agriculture. In case the regional diversity of wheat, rice or any other food plant is destroyed by war, climate change or natural disaster, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds a backup. The facility was made to withstand a nuclear blast, and other structural improvements have been made over the years.
More and more species are continuously added to the vault’s collection. Modifying varieties of organisms to climate change has already been successful, giving some researchers hope that this could be possible in the seed world. For example, modifying coral reefs to withstand higher temperatures and genetically modifying plant species have both been successful projects. In these cases, the change in temperature a species adapts to is limited, but in the case of climate change, rises in temperature are likely to be long-term and continual.