Introduction to Climate-Resilient Crops: Biology, Data & Society

Plant breeding has been enormously successful in increasing the yield, variety and quality of crops we consume on a daily basis. However, we face a major challenge to meet the growing global demand for affordable agricultural products while adapting to climate change (leading to heat waves, droughts, floods, diseases, pests and poor soil) and increasing sustainability-driven constraints on agriculture – challenges exacerbated by growing populations, dietary changes, and declining farmlands. A key element in addressing this challenge is the development of climate-resilient crops that, thanks to new genomic makeups and cultivation methods, thrive even under more variable, more unpredictable, and more often extreme abiotic and biotic stresses. Resilience is, however, a highly complex trait with multiple genes and processes interacting simultaneously and/or over time, involving many trade-offs. Even the most advanced current plant breeding techniques lack the ability to efficiently select for such traits. Moreover, whether resilient crops contribute to sustainable agriculture does not only depend on efficiently breeding resilient varieties, but also on the wider food system. Resilient crops will only be successfully grown by farmers if these crops address farmers’ needs, meet regulatory requirements, and fit with market structures. 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/.

Overall, successful deployment of climate-resilient crops thus requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining recent developments in plant sciences (PS), data science and modelling (DS), and social sciences (SS). In this course students will learn the basics of these fields and how their core concepts are linked to resilient crops. Additionally, the course teaches students to integrate these fields through projects based on specific cases, focusing on the challenges and opportunities in developing and implementing climate-change-resilient and future-proof crops.

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

• Identify their own knowledge gaps in the fields of plant sciences, social sciences and data sciences
• List basic elements of these fields and describe how these elements are related to the development of climate-resilient crops
• Describe the latest developments at the intersection of these fields
• Explain the importance and challenges of integrating these fields  for climate resilient crops and apply these insights to a case-study