Dealing
with a warming world and providing enough food for a growing planet (and doing
so in a sustainable fashion that is adapted to changing climate) is one of the
key challenges humanity must face in coming decades. But what if some of the
greatest resources for helping us deal with global warming already existed in
plain sight?
Asia
is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, with roughly 60% of
the world’s population, most of whom are engaged in agricultural production
systems which have historically been some of the most productive on the
planet. Asian farming systems have
adapted to changes in an annual cycle of rainfall and changing temperatures
known as the Asian monsoon. Although rainfall in South Asia may continue to be
strong, we demonstrate how crops may still be harmed if high temperatures
result in more evaporation and drier soils. Moreover, some of the extra
rainfall may fall in the form of destructive storms rather than in more gradual
rainfall that is more amenable to agricultural production. Reduction in summer
monsoon rains is particularly acute in North China where predicted changes over
the rest of the 21st century imply significant challenges to
farming.
What
if the crops and systems of cultivation that hold the solution to changing
climate already exist? Enter archaeology. Over the course of the past 11,000
years farmers across Asia have developed types of crops and cultivation systems
that have allowed them to be resilient to past climate change. We argue that
this wide range of strategies may prove to be our greatest asset as we face
ongoing and future climatic change.
We
use the past as a guide to the future to argue that it is these traditional
methods of cultivation that might provide humanity’s best assets for
confronting the uncertainties of climate change. In the recent past, agricultural
reforms, such as the Green Revolution in South Asia and the Great Leap Forward
in China, largely ignored the expertise accumulated by Asian farmers over the
centuries and resulted in setbacks for production. Over the past 8000 years
farming systems have been resilient to changes in rainfall because of their
reliance on water from rivers. We review how farmers flexibly managed the
cultivation of dryland crops like wheat, barley and millets in the face of
changing rainfall and temperatures. We find that in some farming systems, like
those of the Indus Valley Civilization, when conditions became too dry, people shifted
cultivation towards arid tolerant crops like millet. In other regions, such as
on the Tibetan plateau, a cold and dry climate event 4000 years ago made it
impossible for farmers to continue to cultivating heat loving millets, and shifted
their production to cold adapted crops like barley.
While
these are well known to archaeologists some of the crops are not well known to
the public. Yet these crops require very little water for their cultivation,
are heat tolerant and may provide important adaptions for future global warming.
Sadly, both the biodiversity of these crops as well as the knowledge of past cultivation
systems are threatened by agricultural practices that have been imposed in the
area.
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