Declining yield resilience

Abstract

Providing food for an extra two to three billion people in a changing climate represents a major challenge for agriculture over the coming decades. One way to maintain yields in the face of increasing climate variability is to utilize a set of crop cultivars that exhibit different responses to climatic conditions. This response diversity confers a degree of resilience to climate change and variability. Helena Kahiluoto from Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), Finland, and co-workers investigate the response diversity of wheat (991 cultivars of winter and spring wheat and durum wheat) from cultivar trials across nine European countries in the period 1991–2014. They find some regional differences in yield responses, but the overall pattern is towards a decline in the response diversity of farmed wheat in most European countries after 2002–2009. This suggests that breeding programmes and cultivar-selection practices are not effectively preparing wheat crops for the increasing climatic variability expected to accompany ongoing climate change. AB