Project description
Developing sustainable resilient crops for climate change
Agriculture is expected to encounter significant challenges because of climate change, impacting food production. Challenges include heatwaves, droughts, soil failures, and the need to reduce CO2 emissions. Consequently, demand is growing for crops that are more resilient and adaptable, leading to increased yields and improved carbon sequestration capabilities. The EIC-funded Crop4Clima project will develop revolutionary rapeseed varieties absorbing 60 % more CO2 and requiring less water when grown under harsh climate conditions, leveraging the natural photorespiration process and increasing photosynthesis. The technology applied is the novel TaCo pathway, which converts CO2 released during photorespiration into CO2 fixation. Crop4Clima aims to promote sustainable and low-impact food supply chains by bringing first-of-a-kind rapeseed varieties to market and making the technology applicable to other crops.
Objective
Current global warming, caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (in particular CO2), is expected to rise from 2.5°C to 4°C by the end of the century. Consequently, agriculture is faced with the urging needs of increasing CO2 sequestration, coping with adverse weather and disastrous events, (ie droughts, heat waves, fire and flooding) and feeding an ever-growing world population projected at 9.7 billion in 2050. Future crops must serve as more efficient carbon sinks to mitigate climate change, plus have higher resilience and productivity to feed the global population. Crop4Clima will develop first-of-a-kind canola and rapeseed lines able to assimilate 60% more CO2 through photorespiration, requiring 20% less amount of water, improving biomass/Ha and still maintaining high oil content values as required for canola derived products. No commercial crops of that kind exist. To reach such product, we will improve and bring to commercial use, a disruptive synthetic metabolic pathway, the TaCo pathway, which turns photorespiration into a CO2-fixing instead of a CO2-releasing process, leading to increased net carbon-uptake under agronomical standard and drought field conditions. Canola and rapeseed are major crops in EU and worldwide. Notably, our technology has commercial prospects to be introduced in other C3 crops such as soybean, cotton, rice and more, based on photosynthetic and genomic similarity. The success of the technology implementation in rapeseed will allow us to establish a start-up seed company aiming to produce and sell high oil seeds with low carbon footprint. In addition and in frame of the program we will develop an innovative business plan taking into considerations how the food value chain is evolving to cope with food supply and climate change signing a precommercial agreement with our industrial partners for the development of our engineered crops up to TRL9 and build trust on the solution proposed.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energy
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- agricultural sciencesagricultural biotechnologybiomass
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinator
7612002 Rehovot
Israel
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.