Global Warming and Future Food Production

Eviatar Nevo

Abstract

A continuing challenge facing the ongoing growing world human populations is global food security. The most threatening environmental planetary problem is global warming. In this review I suggest that bread wheat, the major world staple food, needs genetic improvement to cope with its genetic impoverishment also due to the climate change predicament. The best hope to genetically improve bread wheat is to use the rich biotic and abiotic genetic resources of the wheat progenitor, wild emmer wheat, Triticum dicoccoides (TD), whose place of origin and highest genetic diversity is in northern Israel, the eastern Upper Galilee and Golan Heights. Remarkably, TD is affected both negatively and positively by global warming. Hence, it is imperative to conserve TD both in- situ, and ex- situ, in order to secure its genetic resources for future bread wheat improvement. This will in turn, secure future food production and prevent the predicament of a massive world hunger.