Policymakers at the United Nations COP31 climate conference that started this week in Antalya, Turkey, will know that the UN Environment Programme has confirmed that global warming will exceed the limit of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial temperatures agreed in 2015 in Paris. This meeting comes hot on the heels of the UN COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, which affirmed yet again that the world is also in the middle of a biodiversity crisis. Progress in each case, whether preventing dangerous climate change or stemming biodiversity loss, is too slow. But researchers across scientific disciplines are now arguing that advances in biotechnology could provide solutions1. Methods such as gene editing and germplasm mining — the analysis of huge libraries of plant-genome sequences to find useful traits for crop improvement — can now be used to tackle global warming and protect nature, scientists write in a climate-themed issue of Nature Biotechnology.
The seeds of resilience
There was a time — not that long ago — when many considered biotechnologies a threat to the environment. But as the special issue shows, a shift is under way. Now, the field offers strategies for protecting both climate and biodiversity from the many damaging effects of industrial agriculture.
To feed a growing global population, between 2015 and 2024, the amount of cultivated land grew by roughly eight million hectares a year1. Yet, if the greenhouse-gas emissions, and thus global warming, this expansion causes is to be avoided, the world must work out how to produce enough food within its current agricultural footprint. Land clearance and land-use change contributes up to five billion tonnes of carbon annually — and is a major cause of biodiversity loss. Here, biotech solutions have some of the greatest potential, for example, by helping to increase crop yields and to protect plants from heat, drought and disease.
How biotechnology can mitigate climate change by curbing the global land squeeze
Of 77 such technologies with applications in agriculture, aquaculture and other sectors, many are ready for large-scale testing in the field, propose bioengineers Shekhar Mishra, Lauren Lui and Adam Arkin at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California in a Perspective article2. Argentina, China and the United States have given the green light to engineered drought-tolerant crops.
Rice farming produces around 9% of human-caused emissions of the greenhouse gas methane. Now, researchers have found a way to slash these emissions, write agronomist Yunkai Jin at Hunan Agricultural University in Changsha, China, and his colleagues in a Comment article3.
But technological readiness isn’t enough: governments, regulators and the public need to be ready, too4. Readers might have a sense of déjà vu: in the 1990s, advances in biotechnology promised a revolution in food and agriculture — which subsequently stalled. The ambition was to genetically modify crops or engineer them in other ways so that they could tolerate herbicides, resist insects and fight viruses. But, at the time, many scientists, governments and corporations promoting the technology gave insufficient attention to several issues.
Deployability of biotechnologies for environmentally resilient agriculture
One concern was public anxiety about the idea of eating food produced using transgenic technologies — crops modified by inserting a gene from another plant species or other organism. Another issue was that risks to the environment and to human health had not been studied sufficiently. A third problem was that multinational companies dominated both the research and the development of these technologies, creating fears that the rise of agricultural biotechnology would put many small family farms out of business.
Environmental groups found common cause with consumer organizations. Together, they urged governments to enact strict regulations. In the European Union, for example, risks to human health and the environment needed to be assessed before technologies producing genetically modified organisms could be commercialized. Although this was necessary, it slowed down advances in low- and middle-income countries, because any nation intending to export produce to the EU would have to prove that it was not genetically modified.
All change
Since then, at least two things have changed, increasing optimism about the use of biotechnology to help the planet. The discovery of gene editing — in which an organism’s genes are modified precisely to produce specific traits — has proved transformational for agriculture. The method is being developed cautiously and is regulated in a more nuanced way than were conventional technologies that produce genetically modified crops. In June, the EU amended its regulations on genetic modification and now permits the cultivation of some gene-edited crops.
Low-methane rice is near — the world should deploy it
A second development is that catastrophic events such as heatwaves and floods have meant that climate change and the planet’s protection have become mainstream concerns across science and society, not just for environmental research. In a way, we all need to be environmentalists now, and this provides a rationale for governments to reconsider adopting biotech solutions with appropriate safeguards in place.
Advances in biotechnology that limit land use should be deployed to slow down the rise in global temperatures and biodiversity loss. This will require a partnership between the private sector, scientists, conservationists and farmers. High-yielding crops produced using industrial agriculture have helped to feed the world but have also had a devastating effect on biodiversity. Organic agriculture is more sustainable but requires extra land, because its yields tend to be lower than those from industrial methods. Providing they are implemented wisely, safely and ethically, biotechnologies could contribute to innovative farming methods that offer the best of both worlds.