GoKawiilGastronomic scientist Alessandra Massa, at the Hill-Maini laboratory at Stanford University, holds up a culture of the edible fungus Neurospora intemerdia, grown on brewery waste, and a jar containing savoury miso paste made with this material.Credit: Franklin Lurie
Beyond rising seas, displaced communities and disrupted livelihoods, climate change is increasingly threatening the foundations of food security. For every rise of 1 °C in the global mean surface temperature, there is an annual decrease in global food production equivalent to around 4.4% of the recommended daily consumption per person, according to a 2025 Nature analysis1.
Nature Spotlight: Synthetic biology
Increased soil salinity and other environmental stressors, such as drought and extreme temperatures, are key drivers of this trend, accounting for nearly half of the global crop-yield losses each year. In low-lying areas such as coastal Bangladesh, climate change has been implicated in an uptick in cyclones, rising sea levels and extreme seasonal weather. As a result, millions of hectares of arable land in the country have been damaged, contributing to a decline from a peak of 9.6 million hectares in 1989 to 7.9 million in 2023.
Since the 1970s, the pace of climate change has nearly doubled. Reports suggest that Earth is now warming by around 0.35 ºC per decade. As the global population heads towards nine billion people — of whom some 8.2% are already undernourished, according to the World Health Organization — scientists are looking for ways to future-proof food supplies.
Synthetic biology has emerged as a field offering budding solutions: researchers are using gene-editing tools to design crops that can withstand hostile conditions and to recycle food waste through fungal fermentation. But questions remain around the field’s true potential — can it tackle food insecurity equitably and overcome the legacy of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?
Engineering resilience
Modern agriculture has long relied on crossing plant varieties to produce crops with desirable traits, such as better taste and higher yields. Every staple crop — including maize (corn), rice, soya and wheat — was shaped over thousands of years by farmers’ selective breeding of these plants’ wild ancestors, a process referred to as domestication.
But these techniques favoured yield over stress tolerance. Climate conditions are changing too fast for standard breeding methods to keep pace, and water stress, soil degradation and salinity levels are placing strain on the world’s agricultural industries. “We don’t have thousands of years,” says Vayu Hill-Maini, a bioengineer at Stanford University in California. What we do have, he adds, is synthetic biology, which could help to speed up the domestication process.
In a 2024 paper, plant biologists Michael Palmgren, at the University of Copenhagen, and Sergey Shabala, at the University of Western Australia in Perth, suggest two pathways to more-resilient crops: editing genes to reintroduce stress-tolerance traits lost during breeding, and using precision editing in wild plants that can already endure new climates to introduce the characteristics of modern crops2. Palmgren and Shabala say that environmental-stress tolerance almost always requires multiple genetic components, meaning that the search for a “silver-bullet solution”, or single key genes that can confer resilience, can be counterproductive.
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