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Potential adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 758–763 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate change is expected to severely impact cultivated plants and consequently human livelihoods1,2,3, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)4,5,6. Increasing agricultural plant diversity (agrobiodiversity) could overcome this global challenge7,8,9 given more information on the climatic tolerance of crops and their wild relatives. Using >200,000 worldwide occurrence records for 29 major crops and 778 of their wild relative species, we assess, for each crop, how future climatic conditions are expected to change in SSA and whether populations of the same crop from other continents, wild relatives around the world or other crops from SSA are better adapted to expected future climatic conditions in the region. We show that climate conditions not currently experienced by the 29 crops in SSA are predicted to become widespread, increasing production insecurity, especially for yams. However, crops such as potato, squash and finger millet may be maintained by using wild relatives or non-African crop populations with climatic niches more suited to future conditions. Crop insecurity increases over time and with rising GHG emissions, but the potential for using agrobiodiversity for resilience is less altered. Climate change will therefore affect sub-Saharan agriculture but agrobiodiversity can provide resilient solutions in the short and medium term.

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Fig. 1: Analytical framework.
Fig. 2: Potential security and adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change by 2070.
Fig. 3: Potential security and adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under different scenarios of future climate change.
Fig. 4: Details of the three potential adaptive strategies under future climate change by 2070.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from several databases listed in the Methods of the manuscript. Data are available from the authors on reasonable request and following data restrictions from these databases.

Code availability

The main R functions and packages used in this study are provided in the Methods. Full R scripts are available from the authors on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support of the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) for the Belmont Forum project FICESSA (Food Security Impacts of Industrial Crop Expansion in Sub-Sahara Africa) NE/M021351/1, as well as the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Global Crop Diversity Trust for the ‘Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting and Preparing Crop Wild Relatives’ project. Funders had no role in the preparation of this manuscript. We thank G. Dauby and T. Couvreur for providing unpublished data from the Rainbio database, N. Castañeda-Álvarez for her help with the Crop Wild Relatives Atlas, O. Romero for his help with extracting data from the Genesys database, A. Gasparatos, B. Siddighi Balde and M. Jarzebski for providing data from the agricultural surveys conducted for the FICESSA project, G. von Maltitz for helping selecting crop species and E. Hammond Hunt and M. Soto Gomez for comments on the manuscript and technical assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, UK

    Samuel Pironon, Thomas R. Etherington, James S. Borrell, Nicola Kühn, Ian Ondo, Carolina Tovar, Paul Wilkin & Katherine J. Willis

  2. Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research, Lincoln, New Zealand

    Thomas R. Etherington

  3. School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Marc Macias-Fauria

  4. Oxford Long-Term Ecology Laboratory, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Katherine J. Willis

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  1. Samuel Pironon
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Contributions

S.P., T.R.E., M.M.-F. and K.J.W. designed the study with help from all co-authors. S.P., N.K. and J.S.B. collected data. S.P. analysed the data with help from I.O. S.P. wrote the manuscript, with substantial help from all co-authors.

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Correspondence to Samuel Pironon.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Luigi Guarino and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–9 and Tables 1–6.

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Pironon, S., Etherington, T.R., Borrell, J.S. et al. Potential adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 758–763 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0585-7

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