Credit: © ISTOCKPHOTO / FOTOKOSTIC

Developing fuzzy-leaved varieties of crops could help combat climate change shows new research. Although scientists have previously shown that hair-like structures on leaves tend to scatter light and reduce leaf temperature on individual plants, this study is the first to assess the potential broad-scale cooling effects of the structures.

Researchers led by Christopher Doughty, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, used a model to simulate the impact on global climate of several scenarios in which the reflectance of light from leaves of all crops worldwide was boosted by varying amounts within certain ranges of wavelengths1. The cooling effect was most pronounced at latitudes above 30°, where each 0.01 increase in albedo — a measure of surface reflectivity — decreased daily high temperatures in agricultural regions by an average of 0.25 °C.

The team's analyses of 16 soybean varieties hint that today's hairy-leaved crops won't cool the climate enough to counter the warming expected in coming decades. But breeding new varieties of fuzzy-leaved crops for use in high-latitude regions could be a worthwhile endeavour, the researchers contend.