Benjamin Ryan

Sitting there as a proxy for the collective old guard, the plant physiologist faced the prospect that the next generation of Australians would be the first to wind up worse off than their parents.

But as it happens, Furbank is in a position to help the world get ahead of the looming food shortage crisis stemming from global climate change, as rising temperatures, worsening drought, and changing wind and rainfall patterns threaten agriculture’s capacity to feed the world.

Furbank is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, an enterprise that draws on experts from several Australian universities and the national government’s premier research agency. In tandem with scientists in universities and private labs that span the globe, the center has set its sights on an audacious solution to the impending food crisis: making crops more efficient at conducting photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is the process, vital to all life on earth, by which plants use sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to produce sugars and oxygen.

Crop physiologists project that if they could make plants just 5% more efficient at the process, they could boost the yield of most crops by 20%.

That would be a big help in feeding the global population, which is expected to rise from 7.5 billion today to perhaps 10 billion in 2050. Scientists say that crop yields will need to soar by an estimated 70% or more to keep up with global demand.

If the sheer mathematics of recent history are any guide, there is reason to hope. Between 1960 and 2010, global food production rose by 175%, thanks to a suite of agricultural innovations collectively known as the Green Revolution. By cultivating high-yield grains, refining the use of nitrogen fertilizer and improving irrigation techniques, the agricultural sector averted global famine while the world’s population multiplied at a rapid rate.

However, as the Green Revolution’s methods have approached their apparent biological limits in recent years, global crop yields have stalled. At the same time, modern agriculture has had a destructive effect on the planet through greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen fertilizer pollution, soil degradation and the like.

Experts predict that during the coming decades, researchers will need to cultivate crops that can achieve unprecedented bounty in ever harsher and more unpredictable conditions and yet thrive with fewer resources — including land, water and fertilizer — than today’s varieties.

There’s a lot more than food at stake. Climate change’s effect on agriculture is already contributing to global crises, experts say.

“Food scarcity and crop failures driven by droughts and other causes in the Middle East and Central America have likely contributed to the flooding of refugees into Europe and the United States,” said Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute.

In Australia, agricultural scientists are in a strong position to provide the global agricultural community with valuable insights into what it will take to harvest successful crops in an increasingly forbidding climate.

“As the driest continent on Earth, Australia is the proverbial canary in the coal mine,” said Nick Austin, an Australian native and the director of agricultural development at the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, which invests some $400 million annually into agricultural development. “Much of what is learned in Australia will have relevance to other countries as they face hotter and more variable farming conditions.”

The Australian government’s Grains Research &amp; Development Corp. channels a significant portion of its $200 million research budget toward climate-resilient crop development. The corporation derives the majority of its funding from a levy on farmers’ output, which encourages projects that will increase yields.

On the photosynthesis front, Australian scientists are grappling with improving the performance of an enzyme called rubisco that is abundant in plants and critical to the process. Rubisco works at a slothful pace; 20-40% of the time it picks up oxygen molecules, rather than carbon dioxide molecules, and throws them through the photosynthetic assembly line, wasting water and energy in the process.

In the 1960s, Australian researchers discovered that some plants, including corn and sugar cane, manipulate rubisco into working more efficiently, allowing those crops to thrive in less-forgiving environments. If Furbank and his many colleagues and counterparts across the globe could engineer high-demand crops like beans, rice, wheat and potatoes to function similarly, the scientists could in theory improve those crops’ yields while reducing fertilizer and water demands.

The research teams from 12 institutions in eight nations, including Australia, that comprise the Gates Foundation-funded C4 Rice Project hope to achieve this task in rice that is ready for field planting by the early 2030s.

Robert Sharwood, a researcher in Furbank’s center, is working on corn along with David B. Stern, president of the Boyce Thompson Institute and a plant biologist at Cornell University. They are leading an international research effort that has boasted early success in increasing rubisco levels in corn — and ultimately the crop’s productivity, according to their 2018 paper in Nature Plants.

Wheat, which covers more land than any global crop and provides 20% of all calories and protein consumed by people worldwide, is also a major focus of international research into increasing yields.

Australia’s $6 billion wheat industry is the source of about 8% of worldwide exports of the grain, making the nation’s harvest an important factor in the stability of global markets.

On a recent visit to the ARC Centre, Sharwood and Furbank displayed an array of innovations that allow them to cultivate crops in environments that simulate future climate conditions and devices that closely measure and monitor crop growth.

The rich data those devices collect can help breeders identify the most promising crop varieties and guide farmers’ midseason decision-making — for example, by determining the precise amount of fertilizer, pesticide or irrigation needed.

Complementing the photosynthesis research, Surinder Singh and Thomas Vanhercke at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the national government’s premier research agency, are making progress in engineering crops that can produce up to 30% of their weight in oil, thus offering a sustainable alternative to the environmentally destructive cultivation of palm oil. Their colleague Craig Wood is among those seeking to cultivate plants capable of converting nitrogen from the air into a usable form, reducing the need for fertilizer.

Addressing the variety of experiments underway in this corner of Australia and around the world, Furbank said, “I don’t think there’s going to be a single technological solution to any of this. We need to have concerted action across a number of fronts.”

This article originally appeared in

On a Dry Continent, Giving Plants a Boost

Robert Furbank was at home in Canberra, Australia, watching a news segment about climate change with his two teenagers this summer when his daughter quipped, “Geez, Dad, you’ve really stuffed things up for us, haven’t you?”

The well-worn tactic of hitting people over the head with scary climate change facts has proved inadequate at changing behavior or policies in ways big enough to alter the course of global warming.

While Europe has made some headway, the largest obstacles to change remain in the United States, which has historically been responsible for more emissions than any other country. And perhaps most important, climate change denial has secured a perch in the Trump administration and across the Republican Party.

Enter the fast-growing academic field of climate change communication. Across a swath of mostly Western nations, social scientists in fields like psychology, political science, sociology and communications studies have produced an expansive volume of peer-reviewed papers — more than 1,000 annually since 2014 — in an effort to cultivate more effective methods for getting the global warming message across and inspiring action.

While recent polls have shown an increase in the percentage of people who describe themselves as worried about climate change, experts say not enough people have been motivated to act.

“The main reason people reject the science of climate change is because they reject what they perceive to be the solutions: total government control, loss of personal liberties, destruction of the economy,” said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

“But ironically, what motivates people to care and to act is an awareness of the genuine solutions: a new clean-energy future, improving our standard of living, and building local jobs and the local economy.”

Social-science investigators have found that the most effective tools for engaging the public in the subject of climate change are those that appeal to core human tendencies. For example, people tend to focus on personal and local problems happening now, which means talk of the last remaining polar bears stranded on shrinking icebergs, far from most people, is out.

The best climate-related appeals are not a collection of statistics, but those that target people’s affinity for compelling stories. They also work best if they avoid fear-based messaging (which can cause a head-in-the-sand effect) and provide a sense that individuals can affect the environment in a personal and positive way — by updating to energy-efficient appliances, for example, or eating less meat, given meat production’s heavy carbon footprint.

But these efforts at persuasion are up against a well-financed opposition.

In the United States from 2000 to 2016, major carbon-emitting industries spent more than $1.35 billion lobbying members of Congress on climate change legislation. They outspent environmental groups and renewable energy companies 10 to 1, according to a paper last year in the journal Climate Change by Robert J. Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

A 2015 paper by Bruce Tranter, a sociologist at the University of Tasmania, analyzed 14 Western nations and identified an association between a country’s per capita carbon footprint and the prevalence of climate science skepticism among its citizens.

And in a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, Matthew J. Hornsey, a social psychologist at the University of Queensland, found that nations that had the strongest relationship between political conservatism and climate science skepticism tended to be those with economies more highly dependent on the fossil fuel industry, including the United States, Australia, Canada and Brazil.

At the vanguard of the social-science-based response to such doubt is a pair of centers for climate change communications research at George Mason University and Yale University.

These research hubs just released new polling data indicating that 96% of liberal Democrats and 32% of conservative Republicans support the Green New Deal — a public-opinion gap that widened by 28 percentage points between December and April as awareness about the proposed legislation grew.

In 2009, the two climate labs produced the highly regarded “Six Americas” report, which identified six different groups of Americans who represented the range of public opinion on climate change.

On one end of the spectrum are the “alarmed,” who are the most certain, and most concerned, about human-driven global warming. They’re also the most motivated to act to protect the climate. On the other end of the spectrum are the “dismissives,” who, as their name suggests, are least likely to accept or care about climate change. Between the two polarities are “concerned,” “cautious,” “disengaged” and “doubtful.”

The report has been updated repeatedly since its release and is often used by climate communication researchers to tailor their efforts to each demographic.

One such operation is the nonprofit Climate Outreach, based in Oxford, England. It recently issued a handbook that uses social science research to help climate scientists become better public champions of their own work.

Climate Outreach has also tapped into research that has identified especially effective visual techniques for communicating about climate change.

For example, authentic photos of people actively engaged in global-warming mitigation — such as community members installing solar panels on a roof — are far more resonant than, say, images of politicians at the lectern of a climate conference. So Climate Outreach started Climate Visuals, an open library of research-tested, impactful images.

Major environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are also looking to social science to inform how they communicate about climate change, including their choice of imagery, as are federal agencies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to the agencies’ representatives.

Edward W. Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication has recruited an ever-expanding army to speak about climate science to the masses. His research revealed that the public puts particularly high trust in local TV weathercasters and health care providers as sources about climate science. So over the past decade, Maibach’s team enlisted 625 on-air meteorologists to give newscasts that help viewers connect the dots between climate change and hometown weather.

Another member of the George Mason team, John Cook, is one of various global academics working with a teaching method known as “inoculation,” which is a preventive strategy grounded in the finding that it can be very difficult to extract misinformation once it has lodged in the brain.

Cook has designed a high school curriculum as well as a popular online course that presents students first with facts and then a myth about climate change; the students are then asked to resolve the conflict.

In Europe, Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, codesigned an inoculation-based online game with doctoral researcher Jon Roozenbeek.

The game was designed to help its hundreds of thousands of players become better consumers of climate-related information.

“We’re trying,” van der Linden said, “to help people help themselves and navigate this post-truth environment.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="167fd31a-da52-3e71-ad44-a717f5516cbc" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/climate/these-days-its-not-about-the-polar-bears.html">The New York Times</a>.

Climate science has struggled mightily with a messaging problem.

It's not about the polar bears anymore

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Benjamin Ryan

Articles written by the author

On a Dry Continent, Giving Plants a Boost

It's not about the polar bears anymore