Climate-resilient plants
What leads farmers in climate-vulnerable countries to adopt climate-resilient crops?
Photo: John Wambugu via USAID.
Climate change exposes our food systems to increasing and potentially devastating risk. Less predictable and more extreme weather—from droughts to floods—increases farmers’ costs. Exposure to loss threatens domestic production in many developing countries to the point of imperiling their food security, and increasing the risk of disruption to international markets.
As the unpredictability and extremity of damaging weather increases through climate change, there is an urgent need to find climate resilient crops and crop varieties, and for decision-makers to promote them.
Biological diversity is a critical line of defense in the midst of this uncertainty. But which crops and which traits are best adapted to changing conditions? What are the characteristics that define a “climate-resilient” crop, how widely have they been adopted, and how successful have new varieties been in the face of extreme weather events? This evidence synthesis will look at 30 years of research to answer these questions.
Research team
Maricelis Acevedo
Lead author, Associate Director, Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat Project, Cornell University
Livia Bizikova
Director, SDG Knowledge, International Institute for Sustainable Development
Karen Cichy
Research Plant Geneticist, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Research Service.
Kate Ghezzi-Kopel
Health Sciences and Evidence Synthesis Librarian, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University
Krista Isaacs
Assistant Professor of International Seed Systems. Michigan State University
Sisi Meng
Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, Keough School of Global Affairs, Notre Dame
Kevin Pixley
Director, Genetic Resources Program, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center
Jaron Porciello
Co-director Ceres2030, information scientist, David R. Atkinson Center for Sustainable Development, Cornell University.
Research protocol
The full details of the the protocol for this evidence synthesis are available on the OSF open platform run by the Center for Open Science.
Ceres 2030 is a partnership between Cornell IP-CALS, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD)