Climate-Resilient Crops: an Interdisciplinary Challenge

Crop development in the current changing climate faces different challenges, including meeting global demand, becoming more sustainable, meeting farmers' demands, and promoting fairness and equality. Guiding more efficient and sustainable breeding and cultivation strategies calls for a highly interdisciplinary skillset that combines approaches including advanced data science and modelling, plant stress physiology and breeding, new genomic techniques, and knowledge of societal dynamics. The latter is important as resilient crops will only be successfully grown by farmers if these crops address farmers’ needs, meet regulatory requirements, and fit with market structures. Therefore, success of resilient crops is only sustainable if the food systems they are part of do not create new types of social and economic inequalities that undermine public support. Developing climate-resilient crops hence also requires sociological insights into the wider systems that these crops will be part of. For more information on this we refer to https://cropxr.org/.

This course is the closing part of the minor 'Climate-Resilient Crops: Interdisciplinary Approaches’. In the first course of the minor, ‘Introduction to Climate-Resilient Crops: Biology, Data & Society’, students learn aspects related to interdisciplinary challenges, followed by disciplinary optional courses in the areas in which they still lack background. In this last course, students will reunite to integrate their gained knowledge. They will work in groups on concrete case studies provided by real-world stakeholders (e.g. industry members of the Dutch CropXR consortium, branche organizations, and the ministry) to propose interdisciplinary approaches to address challenges in developing climate-resilient crops. Furthermore, students will be updated on state-of-the-art research on climate-resilient crops through guest lectures by researchers from the field and members of the CropXR network. At the end of the course, students will present their case-studies in the form of a poster presentation in a plenary session.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• Design an innovative project plan to develop climate resilient crops according to case holder’s needs and considering societal implications
• Evaluate and value knowledge gained on interdisciplinary aspects of the development of climate resilient crops and report on this in a reflection essay
• Evaluate and explain how interdisciplinarity and collaboration across disciplines are relevant for such a project

Assumed Knowledge:

Basic knowledge on the different fields of plant sciences, data sciences and social sciences.

It is highly recommended to have completed the course Introduction to Climate-Resilient Crops: Biology, Data & Society and to have completed courses from at least two of the three disciplines that are integrated in this course: plant science, data science, and social sciences.