Climate Change Fight Must Adapt To Drought
As the summer of 2018 ended, the European scientists examined the climate change effects across the continent. According to them, from now on, European summers will be characterized by lots of heat and severe drought causing the crops to dry up and eventually die. Upon this research, the researchers concluded that climate change fight must adapt to drought in order to protect plants.
The European science team, including a group of researchers from the Department of Agroecology at the Aarhus University, studied this issue and issued a report on their findings in the Nature Communications journal.
The team, headed by Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, explored the effects of heat and drought on maize crops and wheat across Europe, especially during the winter. The scientists focused their investigations on insights of plant physiology and revealed, for the first time, what precisely triggers yield losses when elevated temperatures occur due to climate change or global warming.
Climate Change Fight Must Adapt To Drought
“By understanding whether heat or drought poses the greatest risk to the individual types of crops, farmers and plant breeders can more readily develop and select the crop varieties and management systems that are most suitable,” explains Professor Jorgen E. Olesen from the Department of Agroecology at the Aarhus University, and one of the study’s authors.
In case the agriculture practices continue on the current trending, climate change will trigger crops losses in maize. The plants are more exposed to the so-called heat stress. According to scientists, in areas where is enough rainfall, the yields are not endangered by global warming. Accordingly, the climate change fight must adapt to drought.
“Our results show that in Europe drought will be a bigger problem than heat, and that drought is a bigger problem for maize than wheat. This means that it will be less attractive than expected for Danish farmers to switch from wheat to maize as the climate warms up,” Olesen concluded.
Vadim is a passionate writer on various topics but especially on stuff related to health, technology, and science. Therefore, for Great Lakes Ledger, Vadim will cover health and Sci&Tech news.
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