Of all the ways that climate change is predicted to turn our world upside-down, one of the most alarming is the threat global warming poses to food security.

Corn yield in southern Africa is expected to fall up to 30 percent in the next 20 years alone, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international organization devoted to conserving crop diversity. Similar scenarios are predicted to play out around the globe.

To avoid that fate, plant breeders are racing to devise new crop varieties that can take the heat. To move that goal forward, they’re looking backward, to the wild relatives from which our modern crops descended.

On Dec. 9 the Global Crop Diversity Trust announced a new initiative to collect, breed and conserve the wild relatives of 23 essential food crops including wheat, rice, oats, beans, potatoes and chickpeas. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research and the United Kingdom’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew  , are also partnering on the project. 

Humans began domesticating wild plants about 10,000 years ago. In the years since, our crops have lost a great deal of their genetic diversity, said Global Crop Diversity Trust executive director Cary Fowler. The crops growing in our fields are essentially inbred. But the wild relatives of a given crop plant evolved over time to withstand fluctuating environmental conditions. Today, they exhibit a wider variety of traits than their domesticated counterparts. Some of those traits could be very useful, Fowler said.

"We’re going back to the original forms and reaping that original diversity," Fowler said.

Plant breeders have a long history of crossing cultivated crops with their wild relatives to protect them against threats like drought, disease and temperature, said Stephanie Greene, a geneticist-curator at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service who is not involved with the new initiative.

"Historically, crop wild relatives have already proven their worth," Green said.

Nevertheless, most efforts to collect them have been small-scale and ad-hoc.

"Most of our focus on conserving genetic resources in the past has focused on preserving diversity within crop species," Greene said. "There’s been less attention focused on preserving the diversity that’s within our crop wild relatives."
 
This project will change that. It will begin by locating and collecting samples of crop wild relatives around the world. The seeds will be stored in various locations, including the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an underground seed bank in Norway that holds over 500,000 crop plant samples and is managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

This is also a conservation project, said David Williams, coordinator of the System-wide Genetic Resources Programme for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Many crop wild relatives are in danger of extinction, mostly as a result of habitat loss.

"There are cases where progenitors of important crop species have gone extinct before they could be adequately conserved and studied," Williams said.

After the plants are collected, breeders will cross them with their cultivated cousins in hopes of locating traits that might be useful in a warmer world. Flowering during extreme heat can scorch pollen, for example, dramatically reducing crop yields. Introducing wild-type traits to trigger plants to bloom at night could preserve yields.

The breeding process is expected to take seven to 10 years, said Fowler.

"Eventually we hope to go the whole distance, from a wild relative in the field to something that can really be used in an agricultural system," he said.

The resulting seeds will be freely available to breeders and farmers around the world.

Norway provided $50 million to fund the project, which could be expanded in the future.

"We don’t intend to stop with the 23 major crops that are dealt with through this project," said Paul Smith, head of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, the world’s largest depository of wild seeds. "We hope this will grow into an even bigger program."

Ardeshir Damania, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis, who studies crop genetic resources and is not involved with the initiative, believes the project is well worth the cost. Having nature’s traits in our genetic toolkit is invaluable, he says.

"Even if we don’t use them, we can sleep well at night knowing that we have those genes in our gene banks if we have to fall back on them," said Damania.