Preserving the nutritional quality of crop plants under a changing climate: importance and strategies

TLDR

Rapid climate change threatens plant growth and alters the quality and quantity of plant nutrients. The review examines how climate change affects crop nutrition and explores strategies to preserve nutritional quality. The authors review evidence on how elevated CO₂, temperature, salinity, waterlogging, and drought alter nutrient availability in crops. Elevated CO₂ and other climate stresses reduce mineral and protein accumulation in crops, with effects depending on stress characteristics, genotype, and development, and interactions with soil nutrients, suggesting that breeding, farm management, and microbial inoculants may be needed to secure nutritious food.

Abstract

Global climate is changing more rapidly than ever, threatening plant growth and productivity while exerting considerable direct and indirect effects on the quality and quantity of plant nutrients. This review focuses on the global impact of climate change on the nutritional value of plant foods. It showcases the existing evidence linking the effects of climate change factors on crop nutrition and the concentration of nutrients in edible plant parts. It focuses on the effect of elevated CO2 (eCO2), elevated temperature (eT), salinity, waterlogging and drought stresses, and what is known regarding their direct and indirect influence on nutrient availability. Furthermore, it provides possible strategies to preserve the nutritional composition of plant foods under changing climates. Climate change has an impact on the accumulation of minerals and protein in crop plants, with eCO2 being the underlying factor of most of the reported changes. The effects are clearly dependent on the type, intensity and duration of the imposed stress, plant genotype and developmental stage. Strong interactions (both positive and negative) can be found between individual climatic factors and soil availability of nitrogen (N), potassium (K), iron (Fe) and phosphorous (P). The development of future interventions to ensure that the world's population has access to plentiful, safe and nutritious food may need to rely on breeding for nutrients under the context of climate change, including legumes in cropping systems, better farm management practices and utilization of microbial inoculants that enhance nutrient availability.