The Role of Modern Biotechnology in the Fight against the Current and the Future Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change causes various negative effects on plants, especially due to rapid changes in temperature, rainfall patterns, floods or droughts, and outbreaks of pests and diseases. Its change is predicted to cause widespread species expansion and extinction. Climate-induced local extinction has already occurred in hundreds of species. However, at the edge of the warm zone, an equal number of species were not exposed to local extinction, indicating that either phenotypic plasticity or genetic adaptations may allow some populations to persist in warmer conditions. This shows the importance of including intraspecific adaptations in climate change vulnerability assessments. In addition, in response to global climate change, the application of gene editing, also known as genome editing or genome engineering, has emerged as a technology to help organisms adapt to global climate change or mitigate climate impacts. Transforming agriculture by developing crops and livestock that can better withstand the effects of climate change is imperative. Gene editing allows precise changes to a plant's genome, speeding up the production of new crop varieties, including those better able to withstand the stress of a changing climate and those that capture and store excess atmospheric carbon dioxide.The precision and efficiency of creating changes has greatly improved with the introduction of CRISPR/Cas systems, although there is certainly more work to be done with other gene editing techniques.