TY - JOUR

T1 - Nutritional quality of photosynthetically diverse crops under future climates

AU - Walsh, Catherine A.

AU - Lundgren, Marjorie R.

PY - 2024/11/30

Y1 - 2024/11/30

N2 - Summary: Societal Impact Statement: Climate change continues to intensify the challenges of food production as agricultural systems face more variable and extreme weather. Coupled with increasing human population, growers must balance increasing crop yields with nutrient content to prevent global malnutrition. Photosynthetic diversity may permit some crops to tolerate climate change and elevated CO2 whilst maintaining both crop yield quantity and quality. This review examines how photosynthetic diversity interacts with crop production and nutritional stability under elevated CO2 and climate change, and highlights opportunities for photosynthetic diversity to inspire agricultural solutions. Summary: Innovative agricultural solutions are desperately needed to achieve food security for a growing human population amidst the imminent pressures of climate change that threaten more variable and extreme weather, placing additional pressures on already precarious agricultural systems. Not only are crop yields at risk under climate change but rising global atmospheric CO2 concentrations are concurrently driving a carbon dilution effect that threatens to reduce the nutritional quality of our crops to further global malnutrition. Plants using different photosynthetic metabolisms, however, experience these negative impacts to yield and nutrition to different degrees. Thus, photosynthetic diversity may offer solutions to combat malnutrition under climate change and elevated CO2 concentrations, whether that be through targeting existing resilient species for agricultural programmes or applying agricultural biotechnology to engineer photosynthetic diversity into existing crops. Here, we discuss how each major photosynthetic type is predicted to fare under elevated CO2 concentrations and climate change and explore agricultural opportunities to maintain both yield and nutrient stability.

AB - Summary: Societal Impact Statement: Climate change continues to intensify the challenges of food production as agricultural systems face more variable and extreme weather. Coupled with increasing human population, growers must balance increasing crop yields with nutrient content to prevent global malnutrition. Photosynthetic diversity may permit some crops to tolerate climate change and elevated CO2 whilst maintaining both crop yield quantity and quality. This review examines how photosynthetic diversity interacts with crop production and nutritional stability under elevated CO2 and climate change, and highlights opportunities for photosynthetic diversity to inspire agricultural solutions. Summary: Innovative agricultural solutions are desperately needed to achieve food security for a growing human population amidst the imminent pressures of climate change that threaten more variable and extreme weather, placing additional pressures on already precarious agricultural systems. Not only are crop yields at risk under climate change but rising global atmospheric CO2 concentrations are concurrently driving a carbon dilution effect that threatens to reduce the nutritional quality of our crops to further global malnutrition. Plants using different photosynthetic metabolisms, however, experience these negative impacts to yield and nutrition to different degrees. Thus, photosynthetic diversity may offer solutions to combat malnutrition under climate change and elevated CO2 concentrations, whether that be through targeting existing resilient species for agricultural programmes or applying agricultural biotechnology to engineer photosynthetic diversity into existing crops. Here, we discuss how each major photosynthetic type is predicted to fare under elevated CO2 concentrations and climate change and explore agricultural opportunities to maintain both yield and nutrient stability.

KW - CAM

KW - C3‐C4 intermediates

KW - C4 photosynthesis

KW - elevated CO2

KW - climate change

KW - crop nutrition

KW - C2 photosynthesis

KW - agricultural biotechnology

U2 - 10.1002/ppp3.10544

DO - 10.1002/ppp3.10544

M3 - Review article

VL - 6

SP - 1272

EP - 1283

JO - Plants, People, Planet

JF - Plants, People, Planet

SN - 2572-2611

IS - 6

ER -