Climate change impacts biodiversity and therefore represents a threat for the living goods and services humans rely on. Crops are major components of biodiversity providing resources to humans (e.g. food, medicine, energy, textiles…) and those are highly dependent on climatic conditions. Thus, climate change could have highly detrimental consequences for human societies, especially for tropical developing areas relying mostly on smallholder farming such as sub-Saharan Africa. Adaptation could be achieved by improving crop resilience through the selection of particular traits conferring resistance to extreme climatic conditions. Breeding programs require a good identification of landraces or wild species of interest but relatively little is known regarding the climatic tolerance and associated traits of this tremendous diversity of plants. Here, using global occurrence records for 29 sub-Saharan crops and >800 of their wild relatives alongside environmental information, we applied species distribution modelling and ecological niche analyses to first identify which crops and areas may be most affected by climate change by the end of the century. Second, we assess whether other sources of genetic diversity (land races, wild relatives, other crops) are already currently adapted to what will be the future conditions experienced by the crops.
Results/Conclusions
Our results indicate that a few crops (i.e. yam, coffee) may experience larger shifts in climatic conditions in the future than others. In turn, this could have a high impact on the economic activity and food security in several regions across the continent, especially West Africa. However, several landraces of the Neotropic and the Indomalay regions, and wild relatives from Africa or other continents are already experiencing what will be the future conditions of their associated crop in sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. squash, finger millet). This reflects part of the potential resilience of the crops, as well as the potential for improving these crops through breeding programs and adapting to future climate change. These results highlight the importance of agro-biodiversity in order to build a resilient agriculture to the challenges imposed by future environmental change.