Description du projet
Développer des cultures durables et résistantes au changement climatique
L’agriculture devrait être confrontée à des défis importants en raison du changement climatique, ce qui aura un impact sur la production alimentaire. Parmi les défis à relever figurent les vagues de chaleur, les sécheresses, la dégradation des sols et la nécessité de réduire les émissions de CO2. Il en découle une forte augmentation de la demande de cultures plus résistantes et adaptables, ce qui permettrait d’accroître les rendements et d’améliorer les capacités de piégeage du carbone. Le projet Crop4Clima, financé par le CEI, développera des variétés révolutionnaires de colza qui absorbent 60 % de CO2 en plus et nécessitent moins d’eau lorsqu’elles sont cultivées dans des conditions climatiques difficiles, en tirant parti du processus naturel de photorespiration et en augmentant la photosynthèse. La technologie appliquée est la nouvelle voie TaCo, qui convertit le CO2 libéré lors de la photorespiration en fixation de CO2. Crop4Clima vise à promouvoir des chaînes d’approvisionnement alimentaire durables et à faible impact en mettant sur le marché des variétés de colza inédites et en rendant la technologie applicable à d’autres cultures.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
- 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
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Régime de financement
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinateur
7612002 Rehovot
Israël
L’entreprise s’est définie comme une PME (petite et moyenne entreprise) au moment de la signature de la convention de subvention.