Genetic engineering: Saving the climate with genome editing?

According to the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we already have a global warming of 1.2 degrees.

The consequences of this are heat records, for example like in 2018. So it is no longer enough to just cut emissions;

we have to adapt to the rise in temperature even now.

Agriculture in particular has a problem: it is already as badly affected by the climate crisis as few other areas of the economy.

The hot summers of the past few years are particularly troubling for the harvests.

Droughts, pests or fungal attack - these are all consequences of global warming.

Many crops such as barley and wheat are simply no longer able to withstand the high temperatures.

And: global hunger increases with droughts.

Food security will be a determining issue in the future.

One idea: using modern genetic engineering - with so-called genome editing - to adapt the plants to the effects of global warming.

In this podcast report we take a look at whether this technique can help adapt agriculture to the future climate.

One thing is clear: genome editing is not a complete solution, but it could perhaps be part of the puzzle.

The process is not without controversy and "genetic engineering" sounds old-fashioned at first, like cloned sheep, giant corn and considerable protests against it. But the topic is actually very topical. Only in the middle of this year did the Philippines approve genetically modified rice - so-called »golden rice«. Grown like normal rice, this variety contains more vitamin A due to its genetic modification and can thus help against blindness and developmental disorders in children in developing countries.

Nicolaus von Wirén works as an agricultural biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben.

The head of the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology says that adapting plants to the climate could even help reduce CO2 emissions.

If the roots of barley, for example, were artificially lengthened, the plants would need less fertilizer, which is harmful to the climate.

In this episode we will discuss how genome editing works in plants and whether this technology could actually be the future of agriculture.

This time the guests are: Nicolaus von Wirén and Ulrike Lohwasser from the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research.