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Current warming will reduce yields unless maize breeding and seed systems adapt immediately

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Title Current warming will reduce yields unless maize breeding and seed systems adapt immediately
 
Creator Challinor, Andrew J.
Köhler, Ann-Kristin
Ramírez Villegas, Julián
Whitfield, Stephen
Das, B.
 
Subject climate change
agriculture
food security
phenology
developing world
climate change impacts
 
Description The development of crop varieties that are better suited to new climatic conditions is vital for future food production1, 2. Increases in mean temperature accelerate crop development, resulting in shorter crop durations and reduced time to accumulate biomass and yield3, 4. The process of breeding, delivery and adoption (BDA) of new maize varieties can take up to 30 years. Here, we assess for the first time the implications of warming during the BDA process by using five bias-corrected global climate models and four representative concentration pathways with realistic scenarios of maize BDA times in Africa. The results show that the projected difference in temperature between the start and end of the maize BDA cycle results in shorter crop durations that are outside current variability. Both adaptation and mitigation can reduce duration loss. In particular, climate projections have the potential to provide target elevated temperatures for breeding. Whilst options for reducing BDA time are highly context dependent, common threads include improved recording and sharing of data across regions for the whole BDA cycle, streamlining of regulation, and capacity building. Finally, we show that the results have implications for maize across the tropics, where similar shortening of duration is projected.
 
Date 2016-10
2016-06-21T14:55:19Z
2016-06-21T14:55:19Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Challinor AJ, Koehler AK, Ramirez-Villegas J, Whitfield S, Das B. 2016. Current warming will reduce yields unless maize breeding and seed systems adapt immediately. Nature Climate Change 6:954-958.
1758-6798
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/75770
https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3061
 
Language en
 
Rights Copyrighted; all rights reserved
Open Access
 
Format p. 954-958
 
Publisher Springer Science and Business Media LLC
 
Source Nature Climate Change