// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Biotech innovations are an opportunity to limit climate change
Climate change is affecting many types of crop, including these unusually small potatoes.Credit: John Thys/AFP/Getty
Policymakers at the United Nations COP31 climate conference that started this week in Antalya, Turkey, will know that the UN Environment Programme has confirmed that global warming will exceed the limit of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial temperatures agreed in 2015 in Paris. This meeting comes hot on the heels of the UN COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, which affirmed yet again that the world is also in the middle of a biodiversity crisis. Progress in each case, whether preventing dangerous climate change or stemming biodiversity loss, is too slow. But researchers across scientific disciplines are now arguing that advances in biotechnology could provide solutions1. Methods such as gene editing and germplasm mining — the analysis of huge libraries of plant-genome sequences to find useful traits for crop improvement — can now be used to tackle global warming and protect nature, scientists write in a climate-themed issue of Nature Biotechnology.
There was a time — not that long ago — when many considered biotechnologies a threat to the environment. But as the special issue shows, a shift is under way. Now, the field offers strategies for protecting both climate and biodiversity from the many damaging effects of industrial agriculture.
To feed a growing global population, between 2015 and 2024, the amount of cultivated land grew by roughly eight million hectares a year1. Yet, if the greenhouse-gas emissions, and thus global warming, this expansion causes is to be avoided, the world must work out how to produce enough food within its current agricultural footprint. Land clearance and land-use change contributes up to five billion tonnes of carbon annually — and is a major cause of biodiversity loss. Here, biotech solutions have some of the greatest potential, for example, by helping to increase crop yields and to protect plants from heat, drought and disease.
How biotechnology can mitigate climate change by curbing the global land squeeze
Of 77 such technologies with applications in agriculture, aquaculture and other sectors, many are ready for large-scale testing in the field, propose bioengineers Shekhar Mishra, Lauren Lui and Adam Arkin at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California in a Perspective article2. Argentina, China and the United States have given the green light to engineered drought-tolerant crops.
Rice farming produces around 9% of human-caused emissions of the greenhouse gas methane. Now, researchers have found a way to slash these emissions, write agronomist Yunkai Jin at Hunan Agricultural University in Changsha, China, and his colleagues in a Comment article3.
But technological readiness isn’t enough: governments, regulators and the public need to be ready, too4. Readers might have a sense of déjà vu: in the 1990s, advances in biotechnology promised a revolution in food and agriculture — which subsequently stalled. The ambition was to genetically modify crops or engineer them in other ways so that they could tolerate herbicides, resist insects and fight viruses. But, at the time, many scientists, governments and corporations promoting the technology gave insufficient attention to several issues.
Deployability of biotechnologies for environmentally resilient agriculture
One concern was public anxiety about the idea of eating food produced using transgenic technologies — crops modified by inserting a gene from another plant species or other organism. Another issue was that risks to the environment and to human health had not been studied sufficiently. A third problem was that multinational companies dominated both the research and the development of these technologies, creating fears that the rise of agricultural biotechnology would put many small family farms out of business.