AFP UK

Russia on Tuesday is set to launch an actress and film director into space in a historic bid to best the United States to film the first movie in orbit.

If successful, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project that was announced last year by “Mission Impossible” star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Actress Yulia Peresild, 37, and film director Klim Shipenko, 38, are expected to take off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan at 0855 GMT.

Led by veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, they will travel in a Soyuz MS-19 spaceship for a 12-day mission at the International Space Station (ISS) to film scenes for “The Challenge”. 

The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, was revealed by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos to centre around a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.

Shkaplerov and two other Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS are said to have cameo roles in the film.

“For me, space is alluring, welcoming and has no boundaries,” Peresild — who was selected out of 3,000 candidates for the role — said in remarks broadcast by Roscosmos on Tuesday. 

Several hours ahead of take off, the trio arrived at the launchpad clad in heavy spacesuits, waving to the crowds as they boarded their spacecraft.

True to a pre-flight tradition religiously observed by cosmonauts, the crew said that on Sunday they watched the classic Soviet film “The White Sun of the Desert”.

Shipenko and Peresild are expected to return to Earth on October 17 in a capsule with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been on the ISS for the past six months.

“Not only do we need to make a film, we need to come back to Earth alive,” Shkaplerov said. 

If successful, the mission will add to a long list of firsts for Russia’s space industry.

The Soviets launched the first satellite Sputnik, and sent the first animal, a dog named Laika, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into orbit.

– Russians ‘lost interest’ in space –

But compared to the Soviet era, modern Russia has struggled to innovate and its space industry is struggling to secure state funding with the Kremlin prioritising military spending. 

Its space agency is still reliant on Soviet-designed technology and has faced a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and botched launches.

Russia is also falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the United States and China, with Beijing showing growing ambitions in the industry.

Roscosmos was also dealt a blow after SpaceX last year successfully delivered astronauts to the ISS, costing Russia its monopoly for journeys to the orbital station. 

For political analyst Konstantin Kalachev, the space film is a matter of PR and a way to “distract” Russians from the “problems” that Roscosmos is facing.

“This is supposed to inspire Russians, show how cool we are, but I think Russians have completely lost interest in the space industry,” Kalachev told AFP.

In a bid to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia revealed this year that it will be reviving its space tourism programme to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS. 

After a decade-long pause, Russia will send two Japanese tourists — including billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — to the ISS in December, capping a year that has been a milestone for amateur space travel.

Last month, SpaceX completed the first all-civilian mission to space that took four untrained astronauts on a three-day loop around the Earth’s orbit. 

The trip followed the missions of billionaire Richard Branson, who spent several minutes in weightlessness in July, and of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos completing a similar mission just days later.

Later this month, 90-year-old actor William Shatner, known for his portrayal of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek series, will fly to space on a mission with Bezos’s Blue Origin.

India’s transport minister is mulling a law that would seek to replace the country’s constant car-horn cacophony with the sound of music.

“I am studying this and soon planning to make a law that the horns of all vehicles should be in Indian musical instruments so that it is pleasant to hear,” Nitin Gadkari told local media on Monday.

The horns could blast sounds made by the flute, tabla, violin, mouth organ or harmonium, he added.

Gadkari also said he wanted to replace the “irritating” sirens used by ambulances and police vehicles with soothing tunes.

India is home to some of the noisiest cities in the world, as rickshaws, buses, taxis, weaving motorbikes and private cars fight for space on the traffic-clogged roads.

The horn is deemed almost as important as the gas pedal — and more so than wing mirrors — and is used by drivers more to alert other road-users to their presence rather than to rebuke.

India’s colourful trucks often have messages painted on their backs aimed at overtaking drivers such as “Horn OK Please” or “Blow Horn”.

The World Health Organization says noise pollution can cause hearing loss, cardiovascular problems, cognitive impairment, stress and depression.

India’s transport minister is mulling a law that would seek to replace the country’s constant car-horn cacophony with the sound of music.

“I am studying this and soon planning to make a law that the horns of all vehicles should be in Indian musical instruments so that it is pleasant to hear,” Nitin Gadkari told local media on Monday.

The horns could blast sounds made by the flute, tabla, violin, mouth organ or harmonium, he added.

Gadkari also said he wanted to replace the “irritating” sirens used by ambulances and police vehicles with soothing tunes.

India is home to some of the noisiest cities in the world, as rickshaws, buses, taxis, weaving motorbikes and private cars fight for space on the traffic-clogged roads.

The horn is deemed almost as important as the gas pedal — and more so than wing mirrors — and is used by drivers more to alert other road-users to their presence rather than to rebuke.

India’s colourful trucks often have messages painted on their backs aimed at overtaking drivers such as “Horn OK Please” or “Blow Horn”.

The World Health Organization says noise pollution can cause hearing loss, cardiovascular problems, cognitive impairment, stress and depression.

London has the Thames, Paris the Seine, Vienna and Bratislava and Budapest are all on the Danube. And then there’s Brussels, which had the Senne — until they paved over it.

Now, bit by bit, the Belgian capital is starting to uncover its long-hidden waterway to eventually “return nature to the city”.

“It’s a real paradigm shift,” Benjamin Thiebaux, heading up the project for the regional environmental agency, told AFP.

“We can now start thinking about no longer covering up the river and giving it back to Brussels residents,” he said.

The preparatory phase of the progressive unveiling of the Senne was cleaning up its waters. 

The small river was cemented over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because it had long served as a sewer and industrial dumping ground, whose turgid course stank up Brussels and posed a health hazard. 

The French poet Charles Baudelaire, while taking refuge in Brussels from his creditors, notably called it a “big open-air toilet”.

Most of the Senne’s course through the city was erased from the surface, built over to create boulevards and big buildings, with its course diverted and only parts left accessible on Brussels’s outskirts. 

– Long purification task –

It was only in 2007, when the first of two water purification plants was built, that the clean-up of the river got properly under way.

With that monumental task having mostly sanitised the once-malodorous watercourse, the Brussels region on Tuesday is inaugurating the first 200-metre (650-foot) stretch of the Senne to be brought out of the dark.

Thiebaux pointed to where a mechanical digger was placing large blocks of vegetation on the riverbed.

“These aquatic plants will take root on the banks and recreate vegetation promoting biodiversity,” he said.

The goal is for the Senne to once again become “an ecological corridor, with the water purified by the plants, which will also provide shelter” for fish and birds.

But, for all Thiebaux’s enthusiasm and the project’s ambition, residents and visitors to Brussels will not be seeing any quick, dramatic transformation.

That is because the covered-up parts of the river — around two-thirds of the 15 kilometres of its course through the city — have over time become the base for indispensable urban structures, such as the city’s main railway station.

Currently, a riverside walkway exists along just 600 metres of the Senne in the southern district of Anderlecht. 

The plan is to double that promenade over the next three years, with the addition of a city-centre park, picnic tables and bike paths.

The objective is that “the river again becomes a true waterway that can be a source of pleasure, of leisure, of well-being,” said Aude Hendrick, curator of the city’s Sewer Museum.

How can passengers take 10 billion flights a year without contributing to global warming? The question of “greening” the international aviation sector by 2050 constitutes a colossal task whose stakes — and sheer numbers — can make the head spin, according to the airlines themselves.

At its general assembly in Boston Monday, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said it is now aiming for “net zero carbon emissions” by the middle of the century, a bold but necessary goal in the face of global warming, according to its CEO Willie Walsh.

But by signing up to the goals of the Paris climate accord, and those of the European Union, IATA, which represents the airlines, does not envisage that a massive reduction in emissions will also involve a massive reduction in its operations. Quite the opposite.

“For us the main target is to continue growing, because it’s not the traffic that is the enemy, it’s the emissions,” said Sebastian Mikosz, IATA vice president in charge of environmental affairs and sustainable development.

Even though air transport has suffered a huge downturn due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with a drop from 4.5 billion travelers in 2019 to 1.8 billion in 2020, IATA estimates that by 2050 more than 10 billion trips per year will be made by plane.

As it stands, the aviation sector produces 900 million tons of CO2 per year, according to IATA. By 2050, if nothing is done to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint, that will rise to 1.8 billion tons. 

That would mean that over 30 years, 21.2 billion tons of CO2 would be released into the atmosphere. Reducing this level to gradually achieve net zero emissions in 2050 poses an enormous technological challenge that the IATA estimates will cost companies around $1.55 trillion between 2020 and 2050.

– 10,000% increase in production –

IATA says that the main solution lies in the use of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), which would allow the industry to get 65 percent of the way toward its goal.

These fuels — made from biomass, waste oils and could even be made from carbon capture in the future — have the advantage that they can be used directly in existing aircraft, which are designed to run on 50-percent blends of kerosene. And such fuel sources can reduce CO2 emissions by 80 percent compared to kerosene over their entire life cycle, according to IATA.

Airbus and Boeing have pledged that their fleets will be able to fly 100 percent on SAF by 2030, but SAF accounts for less than 0.1 percent of aviation fuel currently used.

Encouraged by governments, the infrastructure to produce SAFs is being set up in the United States and Europe, but is still embryonic — and the cheapest fuel that comes out costs four times more than kerosene, a fossil fuel.

“The problem is the capacity and the supply,” said Mikosz, who said the goal was “basically to grow to 450 billion liters of SAF compared to 100 million liters.”

“We need to multiply our supply by 10,000 percent,” he said.

Still, IATA believes that the technological advances promised by the aerospace industry, in particular new electric or hydrogen planes such as those that Airbus is preparing for 2035, are not yet a sure enough bet for the sector to rely on in order to “decarbonize” beyond 13 percent by 2050.

“If those technologies do not deliver what we need by 2050… we can compensate it through SAF,” said Mikosz.

The European aviation sector, in publishing its own roadmap towards carbon neutrality for 2050 last February, said it was counting on technological advances to cut 37 percent of its emissions by 2050 and on SAF to cut 34 percent.

IATA’s strategy, like that of the European aviation sector, also relies on a system of carbon capture and emissions trading to start the transition, amounting to 19 percent of the total reduction. 

But environmental NGOs have criticized the use of carbon capture and offsetting mechanisms, asking that they be used only after all other mitigation options have been implemented.

Russia on Tuesday is set to launch an actress and a film director into space in a bid to best the United States to the first movie in orbit.

If successful, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project that was announced earlier this year by “Mission Impossible” star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Actress Yulia Peresild, 37, and film director Klim Shipenko, 38, are expected to take off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan at 0855 GMT.

Led by veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, they will travel in a Soyuz MS-19 spaceship for a 12-day mission at the International Space Station (ISS) to film scenes for “The Challenge”. 

The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, was revealed by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos to centre around a female surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save an astronaut.

Clad in a flight suit, director Shipenko called the film “an experiment” at an online press conference on Monday. 

“Some things will work out and some things won’t,” he conceded.

Shipenko and Peresild are expected to return to Earth on October 17 in a capsule with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who has been on the ISS for the past six months. 

The launch comes at a challenging time for Russia’s space industry, which is struggling to secure state funding with the Kremlin prioritising military spending.

Compared to the Soviet era — when Moscow launched the first satellite Sputnik and sent the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into space — Russia has struggled to innovate. 

– Russians ‘lost interest’ in space –

Its space agency is still reliant on Soviet-designed technology and has faced a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and botched launches.

Russia is also falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the United States and China, with Beijing showing growing ambitions in the industry.

Roscosmos was also dealt a blow after SpaceX last year successfully delivered astronauts to the ISS, costing Russia its monopoly for journeys to the orbital station. 

But for political analyst Konstantin Kalachev, the space film is a matter of PR and a way to “distract” Russians from the “problems” that Roscosmos is facing.

“This is supposed to inspire Russians, show how cool we are, but I think Russians have completely lost interest in the space industry,” Kalachev told AFP.

In a bid to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia revealed this year that it will be reviving its space tourism programme to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS. 

After a decade-long pause, Russia will send two Japanese tourists — including billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — to the ISS in December, capping a year that has been a milestone for amateur space travel.

Last month, SpaceX completed the first all-civilian mission to space that took four untrained astronauts on a three-day loop around the Earth’s orbit. 

The trip followed the missions of billionaire Richard Branson, who spent several minutes in weightlessness in July, and of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos completing a similar mission just days later.

From a bowl of rice to a cup of coffee, experts say the foods we take for granted could become much scarcer unless we can make them resistant to climate change.

For more than 10,000 years humans have been using selective breeding to adapt fruits and vegetables to specific growing conditions that today are changing at an alarming rate.

And the same breeding that has made crops profitable has also made them vulnerable to rising temperatures, drought, heavy rains, new blights or plagues of insects. 

“When you select ‘for the best’ traits (like higher yields), you lose certain types of genes,” Benjamin Kilian, project lead for the Crop Wild Relatives Project at Crop Trust, told AFP. 

“We lost genetic diversity during domestication history… therefore the potential of the elite crops to further adapt to the future — to climate change and other challenges — is limited.”

The answer, scientists say, may be to reintroduce that genetic diversity by going back to domesticated crops’ wild ancestors.

– Disappearing farmlands –

According to a study published in May, global warming risks shifting nearly a third of agricultural production outside its ideal climate for cultivation.

The International Potato Center predicts a 32-percent drop in harvests of potatoes and sweet potatoes by 2060 due to climate change, while some estimates say coffee growers will lose half of adapted lands before 2050.

Rice, the world’s most important staple food crop, contributes massively to global warming by releasing methane as it is cultivated. It is also threatened by rising seas that could put too much salt into the water that floods rice paddies. 

Older forms of these crops might have had resistance to salt water or high temperatures coded into their genes — and to get them back, experts are looking for their ancestors in the wild.

“We’re going to need to use as much biodiversity as we can… because it reduces risks, it provides options,” says agriculture expert Marleni Ramirez of Biodiversity International.

One potential resource is gene banks, like the Kew Millennium Seed Bank which has nearly 40,000 species of wild plants.

“But not all wild relatives are in the gene banks,” says Kilian. 

Instead, he says it’s up to expert botanists to take undertake a time-consuming search throughout the wild, whose success can sometimes rely on luck.

– Race against time –

Between 2013 and 2018 the Global Crop Diversity Trust gathered more than 4,600 samples from 371 wild cousins of 28 priority crops including wheat, rice, sweet potatoes, bananas and apples.

Botanist Aaron Davis works at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens that partners with Crop Trust.

With his colleagues, he discovered a wild species of coffee in Sierra Leone that is more resistant to climate change than the widely harvested arabica.

And he says they found it just in time. 

“If we had gone to Sierra Leone in 10 years, it would probably have been extinct,” says Davis.

“Of 124 coffee species, 60 percent are threatened with extinction, including the ones we might use for breeding new resilient coffees.”

In a survey of four Central American countries, one in four plants analysed was threatened with extinction, including 70 wild species connected to major cultivated crops like corn and squash.

And the race isn’t over once they’ve been harvested. 

Wild plants may not be adapted to large-scale agriculture and creating new varieties can take years or even decades — perhaps too long to provide an answer to an impending food crisis. 

Instead, experts say, we may have to find a way to live without certain staples.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, while the planet is home to some 50,000 edible plants, just three of them — rice, maize and wheat — provide 60 percent of the world’s food energy intake.

Their disappearance could leave billions wondering what to eat and millions of farmers looking for a new way to survive.

Turkish farmer Hava Keles stares inconsolably at withered vines of rotting tomatoes in a field that has been devastated by a series of droughts blamed on climate change.

“My tomatoes, my beans, my peppers are ruined. My watermelons didn’t even grow. The cucumbers I planted have shrivelled up on the branches,” lamented Keles, 58, standing in an arid Anatolian plot in Akkuzulu, north of Ankara.

Keles is among thousands of farmers across Turkey whose livelihoods have been ravaged as little rain has fallen to nourish their crops for the past two years.

Some experts accuse President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — whose popularity has relied on prosperity driven by fast urban development — of failing to do enough to address pressing environmental issues in the country.

But Erdogan has promised Turkey would ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement in October before a pivotal UN climate summit next month in Glasgow. Turkey signed the deal in 2016.

Environmental issues had never topped the political agenda in Turkey, but everything changed after a summer of extreme weather events, including forest fires on the Mediterranean coast and devastating floods in the north.

Action cannot come soon enough for indebted farmers like Keles in a country where droughts have spread to more than of the territory. 

“My husband says leave the garden. But I can’t. I’ve worked too hard for this. What can I do with it now?” she asks, despite having debts worth thousands of dollars.

This summer, farmers in her neighbourhood were unable to dig deep enough to find groundwater, so they had to fetch it in large tanks pulled by tractors.

– ‘Serious events coming’ –

Agriculture is a major sector of the Turkish economy, accounting for around six percent of GDP and employing 18 percent of the workforce.

Turkey is self-sufficient in food production and is the world’s seventh largest agricultural producer, exporting everything from hazelnuts to tea, olives to figs.

But the country’s import of wheat has already risen exponentially in nearly two decades from $150 million to $2.3 billion in 2019, according to the agriculture ministry.

Such figures add to fears Turkey will move from producer to becoming a country reliant on the outside to meet its food needs.

“Turkey has a lot to adapt to, especially in terms of agriculture because serious drought events are coming. What we have seen is nothing,” warned Levent Kurnaz, director of Bogazici University’s centre for climate change and policy studies in Istanbul.

Drought is forcing some farmers to quit while others opt to grow different crops that demand less water, leaving the consumer out of pocket as food prices rise alongside a weakening Turkish lira.

Food inflation hit 29 percent in August from last year, and in a bid to ease the pain, Erdogan cut import customs duties to zero for basics such as wheat, chickpeas and lentils until the end of the year. 

Experts say the government has failed in its water management policies, exacerbating the problem.

Farmers are impacted by significantly reduced water levels in dams across Turkey, which put the water needs of every citizen at risk as well, while lakes are drying up.

“We need to build our cities in a way that allows underground water levels to rise,” said Ceyhun Ozcelik, associate professor in the water resources department at Mugla Sitki Kocman University.

“If we don’t take the necessary measures, if the urban infrastructure is not enough, then I can say we face difficult days in the years ahead,” he added.

– ‘Transform lifestyles’ –

In the west of the country on the Aegean coast, green olive groves coat the hills in Milas, famous for its olive oil which gained European Union protected status in December. But the fruit is also at risk.

Ismail Atici, Milas agricultural chamber chief, said rain had not fallen at all in 2021.

“If there is still no rain for one, or two more months, the trees will not be able to nourish the fruits,” he added.

Farmers’ costs are spiralling.

Ferdun Cetinceviz, 41, who tends to some 200 cows and corn fields among the mountains, said he is losing up to 40,000 lira per month ($4,500, 3,900 euros).

Surrounded by dry, flat land and green mountains in the distance, Cetinceviz estimated up to 50 percent of his crop yield including corn was lost this year due to drought.

Farmers in Milas used to grow cotton, but it requires vast quantities of water, so they switched to corn.

“If I can’t water my crops which my animals also need, they will be left hungry,” Cetinceviz said.

After Syrian farmer Abdelbaqi Souleiman lost his last wheat crop to a wildfire, he had hoped for a better harvest this summer. But this spring there was hardly any rain.

“Last year the field I planted was burnt to the ground,” said the 48-year-old.

“This year there wasn’t enough rain, and we didn’t harvest any wheat.”

As man-made climate change increases the likelihood of drought and wildfires worldwide, Syria has also been hit hard by low rainfall this year, especially in its breadbasket Hasakeh province.

In the Kurdish-run northeastern region, dismal wheat harvests have raised alarm about food security in a war-torn country where 60 percent of people already struggle to buy food.

In Hasakeh, humanitarian agencies estimate crop production to have dropped by more than 95 percent compared to last year in large parts of the province.

Souleiman said the lack of downpour, coupled with the high price of fuel for irrigation, seeds and fertiliser, had made growing the rain-fed cereal a near mission impossible.

“At this rate, we’ll have to stop growing wheat,” he said in the village of Tal Shaeer.

“Farmers are going to have to start planting herbs like coriander and cumin because it’s cheaper and they sell for more.”

– ‘Selling our women’s gold’ –

Outside the town of Qahtaniyah in the same province, Hajji Mohammed, 71, said he and his neighbours had also fallen on rough times.

“Farming has become a loss-making business,” said the agricultural worker of 45 years in the village of Kardeem Haleema. 

“If there’s no rain this year, most people will move away.”

After years of losses, the family had next to no resources left with which to launch into another season.

“We’re trying to sell our women’s gold or furnishings so we can buy the seeds,” he said.

Before the war erupted in 2011, Syria produced up to 4 million tonnes of wheat a year — enough to feed its entire population, but harvests have since plunged to record lows, increasing dependence on imports.

The agriculture minister in Damascus said last month the country produced 900,000 tonnes of the grain this year, less than half of the two million tonnes needed.

Salman Barodo, co-president of the economy and agriculture commission with the Kurdish authorities, said this year’s harvest had fallen far short of demand for the region’s bakeries.

“In previous years, we’d reap more than 600,000 tonnes of wheat,” he said. It was enough for flour, seeds for the following season, and a little left over in reserve.

“But this year it was just 184,000 to 185,000.”

– Harvest ‘very low’ –

The poor harvest comes as the whole of northeast Syria is already facing a humanitarian disaster this year, aid agencies have warned, as low rainfall has also drastically depleted water levels along the Euphrates river.

This has threatened electricity production and drinking water supplies, and complicated access to the river for irrigation.

In the neighbouring province of Raqa, 42-year-old wheat farmer Ahmed al-Humaidi said he had briefly considered switching to irrigation to save his crop.

“We thought of drawing water from the Euphrates… but we were not able to because of the high cost” of equipment and fuel, he said in the village of Salhabiyah.

Mike Robson, the representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Syria, said the rainy season ended unusually early in March this year.

High temperatures the following month then prevented the grains from filling out properly.

“We don’t yet have the full final numbers for the harvest for this year, but we’re expecting it to be very low — possibly about half the figure for last year,” he said.

This would likely mean more price hikes, and more families struggling to feed themselves.

Already, the World Food Programme said in February that a staggering 12.4 million people in Syria — out of an estimated population of 20 million — were food insecure.

“We’re expecting a further increase,” Robson said.

From a bowl of rice to a cup of coffee, experts say the foods we take for granted could become much scarcer unless we can make them resistant to climate change.

For more than 10,000 years humans have been using selective breeding to adapt fruits and vegetables to specific growing conditions that today are changing at an alarming rate.

And the same breeding that has made crops profitable has also made them vulnerable to rising temperatures, drought, heavy rains, new blights or plagues of insects. 

“When you select ‘for the best’ traits (like higher yields), you lose certain types of genes,” Benjamin Kilian, project lead for the Crop Wild Relatives Project at Crop Trust, told AFP. 

“We lost genetic diversity during domestication history… therefore the potential of the elite crops to further adapt to the future — to climate change and other challenges — is limited.”

The answer, scientists say, may be to reintroduce that genetic diversity by going back to domesticated crops’ wild ancestors.

– Disappearing farmlands –

According to a study published in May, global warming risks shifting nearly a third of agricultural production outside its ideal climate for cultivation.

The International Potato Center predicts a 32-percent drop in harvests of potatoes and sweet potatoes by 2060 due to climate change, while some estimates say coffee growers will lose half of adapted lands before 2050.

Rice, the world’s most important staple food crop, contributes massively to global warming by releasing methane as it is cultivated. It is also threatened by rising seas that could put too much salt into the water that floods rice paddies. 

Older forms of these crops might have had resistance to salt water or high temperatures coded into their genes — and to get them back, experts are looking for their ancestors in the wild.

“We’re going to need to use as much biodiversity as we can… because it reduces risks, it provides options,” says agriculture expert Marleni Ramirez of Biodiversity International.

One potential resource is gene banks, like the Kew Millennium Seed Bank which has nearly 40,000 species of wild plants.

“But not all wild relatives are in the gene banks,” says Kilian. 

Instead, he says it’s up to expert botanists to take undertake a time-consuming search throughout the wild, whose success can sometimes rely on luck.

– Race against time –

Between 2013 and 2018 the Global Crop Diversity Trust gathered more than 4,600 samples from 371 wild cousins of 28 priority crops including wheat, rice, sweet potatoes, bananas and apples.

Botanist Aaron Davis works at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens that partners with Crop Trust.

With his colleagues, he discovered a wild species of coffee in Sierra Leone that is more resistant to climate change than the widely harvested arabica.

And he says they found it just in time. 

“If we had gone to Sierra Leone in 10 years, it would probably have been extinct,” says Davis.

“Of 124 coffee species, 60 percent are threatened with extinction, including the ones we might use for breeding new resilient coffees.”

In a survey of four Central American countries, one in four plants analysed was threatened with extinction, including 70 wild species connected to major cultivated crops like corn and squash.

And the race isn’t over once they’ve been harvested. 

Wild plants may not be adapted to large-scale agriculture and creating new varieties can take years or even decades — perhaps too long to provide an answer to an impending food crisis. 

Instead, experts say, we may have to find a way to live without certain staples.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, while the planet is home to some 50,000 edible plants, just three of them — rice, maize and wheat — provide 60 percent of the world’s food energy intake.

Their disappearance could leave billions wondering what to eat and millions of farmers looking for a new way to survive.