European wheat unprepared for climate change

Current breeding programmes and cultivar selection practices of European wheat crops are unprepared for increasingly variable weather conditions, according to new research.

Based on thousands of observations of wheat cultivars in nine European countries, a research group led by Professor Jørgen E. Olesen from the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University found greater variability and extremeness of local weather conditions will lead to reduced wheat yields.

Rather than tailoring genotypes to the most likely long-term change, scientists can promote a crop’s climate resilience by developing a set of cultivars with diverse responses to weather conditions.

“The capacity of a single crop genotype to maintain a good yield performance under climatic variability and extremes is limited; therefore, a set of cultivars with diverse responses to critical weather conditions is required to promote the climate resilience of crops,” the report reads.

The researchers found wheat response diversity on farmers’ fields in most European countries has worsened in the past five to 15 years, with gaps in wheat resilience across all of Europe, especially in regards to yield performance under abundant rain.

Wheat yield is sensitive to even a few days of waterlogging and wet weather, while heat stress rather than drought sensitivity appears to be a limiting factor for adaptation of wheat to climate change in Europe.

A lack of response diversity can pose serious problems with food security and farmers breeders and dealers in seeds and grain need to pay more attention to diversity of cultivars grown. Increased awareness of the need for climate resilience in staple food crops such as wheat could come in the form of research and breeding programs, incentives and regulation, the study added.

The paper was published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.