Green Options

A new global project is screening food crops for useful traits that can be adapted for reversing the effects of climate change and boost their diversity and sustainable production.

This will involve the setting up of crop banks and seed vaults, so to speak, in developing countries that depend on staples such as corn and rice, to tap on their valuable ’sustainability traits’ as a way of conserving the diversity of the world’s food crops.

In attempts to boost food security, crops from banana to sweet potato will be screened to identify material that plant breeders can use to produce varieties adapted to conditions associated with climate change.

This is a guest post by Meg Hamill who works at LandPaths in Partnership with The Open Space District of Sonoma County, California.

Here’s a question, not meant to keep you up at night, but definitely worth thinking about:  Which of the foods in your refrigerator right now would be likely to survive a global climate change?

Lucky for us, this question is not going unanswered.  The Global Crop Diversity Trust recently earmarked 1.5 million dollars towards screening the world’s food supply for natural resistances to floods, temperature change, and droughts.  The Trust is also looking for higher yielding crops that need little water and less space to grow.

The overarching mission of the organization is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security, worldwide.  In February of this year, they opened the doors of their “Arctic Seed Vault,”  otherwise known as “Doomsday Vault,” a safe haven for seeds from all over the world.  The vault was dug into a mountainside in Svalbard, a group of islands nearly a thousand kilometers North of Norway.