Our crops and other plants may not be able to adapt to climate change
by David Atkins
More bad news on the climate front:
A new study suggests that modern flowering plants, trees and agricultural crops may not have the characteristics, or the time, to respond to rapid human-induced climate change.
The report in Nature looks at how plants evolved to cope with cold in the past, but finds these same mechanisms may not provide the same defense against human-induced climate change…
They identified three traits that help them do that: dropping their leaves before the winter chill, narrowing the cells that transport water from the roots to the leaves, and dying back to the ground and re-sprouting from their roots or seeds in the spring.
“The next bit was, we wanted to not just look at where species are today and whether they are seeing freezing or not, but to try to understand the evolution of these characteristics and the order of the evolution of those characteristics or those traits,” Zanne said.
To do that, the researchers constructed the largest-ever time-scaled evolutionary tree of 32,000 plant species. They then compared the emergence of those adaptive traits with big changes in the Earth’s climate to reconstruct how plants evolved with the cold as they spread across the globe.
What happened, unsurprisingly, is that the plants evolved traits to deal with changing temperatures over gradual timescales. If the changes had been more sudden, they would not have been able to adapt.
Climate change, needless to say, is a sudden event. Crops and other plants will have a difficult time adapting.
It’s not going to be possible to simply “adapt” to climate change. Mitigation will be essential. And, unfortunately, for right-wing economic ideology, mitigation is going to require large-scale international governmental regulation. There’s no other way.
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