Looks like we’re all going to start getting a bit hungrier.
Climate change could drive many wild relatives of plants such as the potato and the peanut into extinction, threatening a valuable source of genes necessary to help these food crops fight pests and drought, an international research group said Tuesday.
Over the next 50 years, more than 60 percent of 51 wild peanut species analyzed and 12 percent of 108 wild potato species analyzed could become extinct because of climate change, according to a study by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
Surviving species would be confined to much smaller areas, further eroding their capacity to survive, the study said.
The study looked at the distribution of various species and predicted their ability to survive based on current and projected climate data for 2055.
Farmers and researchers often depend on wild plants to breed new varieties of crops that contain genes for traits such as pest resistance or drought tolerance, and that reliance is expected to increase as climate changes strain the ability of crops to continue to have the same yields as now, the group said in a statement.
In the promo they’re running for a story on this on NPR tomorrow, they’re saying that the estimates are 1 out of 6 plants could go extinct. Given that they’ve gotten the time table for how fast the climate is going to heat up wrong (it’s going faster than expected), then I think the actual number of plants becoming extinct will be higher.