scholarly journals Maize Responses Challenged by Drought, Elevated Daytime Temperature and Arthropod Herbivory Stresses: A Physiological, Biochemical and Molecular View

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristhian Camilo Chávez-Arias ◽  
Gustavo Adolfo Ligarreto-Moreno ◽  
Augusto Ramírez-Godoy ◽  
Hermann Restrepo-Díaz

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the main cereals grown around the world. It is used for human and animal nutrition and also as biofuel. However, as a direct consequence of global climate change, increased abiotic and biotic stress events have been reported in different regions of the world, which have become a threat to world maize yields. Drought and heat are environmental stresses that influence the growth, development, and yield processes of maize crops. Plants have developed dynamic responses at the physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels that allow them to escape, avoid and/or tolerate unfavorable environmental conditions. Arthropod herbivory can generate resistance or tolerance responses in plants that are associated with inducible and constitutive defenses. Increases in the frequency and severity of abiotic stress events (drought and heat), as a consequence of climate change, can generate critical variations in plant-insect interactions. However, the behavior of herbivorous arthropods under drought scenarios is not well understood, and this kind of stress may have some positive and negative effects on arthropod populations. The simultaneous appearance of different environmental stresses and biotic factors results in very complex plant responses. In this review, recent information is provided on the physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses of plants to the combination of drought, heat stress, and the effect on some arthropod pests of interest in the maize crop.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naseer Ahmed Abbasi ◽  
Xiangzhou Xu

<p><strong>Abstracts:</strong> Influenced by global climate change, water shortages and other extreme weather, water scarcity in the world is an alarming sign. This article provides evidences regarding the Tunnel and Tianhe project’s feasibility and their technical, financial, political, socioeconomic and environmental aspects. Such as how to utilize the water vapour in the air and to build a 1000 km long tunnel project to fulfill the goal of solving water shortage in China. The projects are promising to solve the problem of water, food and drought in the country. In addition, the telecoupling framework helps to effectively understand and manage ecosystem services, as well as the different challenges associated with them. Such efforts can help find the ways for proper utilization of water resources and means of regulation.</p><p><strong>Key words: </strong>Sustainability; water shortage; transfer project</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1100-1107
Author(s):  
Nguyen Van Phu

Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human beings, and agriculture is one of the fields that is most negatively affected by climate change. Farmers around the world and global food supply chains are impacted by the more extreme weather phenomena and increased damage of diseases and pests caused by climate change. Today, almost all agricultural enterprises and farms consider climate change a serious long-term risk for their production. Agricultural land systems can produce significant greenhouse gases (GHGs) by the conversion of forests to crop- and animal lands, and also through the weak management of crops and livestock. Around the world, cultivation and cattle production accounts for 25% of global GHG emissions (Javeline, ‎2014). However, under suitable conditions, agriculture can create environmental conditions that can help minimize pollution and the negative effects of climate change including carbon absorption by green plants in forests, and fields for watershed protection and biodiversity conservation. Sustainable agriculture helps farmers to adapt, maintain, and improve productivity without applying harmful techniques. In turn, this allows farms to manage and mitigate climate-related risks in their supply chains. The Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) has found new ways to incorporate smart climate cultivation methods into all farming practices to help farms and enterprises carry out agriculture sustainably.


2017 ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
Debasis Poddar

Hindu Kush Himalayan region (hereafter the HKH) - with 3500 odd kilometres stretched in eight countries- is default resource generation hub for about one-fifth population of the world. The ecosystem-growing delicate these days- seems to play a critical role for the survival of flora and fauna along with the maintenance of all its life-sustaining mountain glaciers. Ten major rivers to carry forward hitherto sustainable development of these peoples fall into question now. Further, in the wake of global climate change today, the delicate HKH ecosystem becomes increasingly fragile to unfold manifold consequences and thereby take its toll on the population. And the same might turn apocalyptic in its magnanimity of irreversibledamage. Like time-bomb, thus, climate ticks to get blown off. As it is getting already too delayed for timely resort to safeguards, if still not taken care of in time, lawmakers ought to find the aftermath too late to lament for. Besides being conscious for climate discipline across the world, collective efforts on the part of all regional states together are imperative to minimize the damage. Therefore, each one has put hands together to be saved from the doomsday that appears to stand ahead to accelerate a catastrophicend, in the given speed of global climate change. As the largest Himalayan state and its central positioning at the top of the HKH, Nepal has had potential to play a criticalrole to engage regional climate change regime and thereby spearhead climate diplomacy worldwide to play regional capital of the HKH ecosystem. As regional superpower, India has had potential to usurp leadership avatar to this end. With reasoningof his own, the author pleads for better jurisprudence to attain regional environmental integrity inter se- rather than regional environmental integration alone- to defendthe vulnerable HKH ecosystem since the same constitutes common concern of humankind and much more so for themselves. Hence, to quote from Shakespeare, “To be or not to be, that is the question” is reasonable here. While states are engaged in the spree to cause mutually agreed destruction, global climate change- with deadly aftermath- poses the last and final unifier for them to turn United Nations in rhetoric sense o f the term.


Author(s):  
Oleg Adamenko ◽  
Yaroslav Adamenko ◽  
Kateryna Radlovska ◽  

Paleontological location of the Pleistocene fauna of hairy rhinos and mammoths near the village. Starunya Bogorodchany district of Ivano-Frankivsk region (Prykarpathian, Ukraine) is considered as a paleoclimatic rapper of global changes and a stratigraphic "bridge" linking stratigraphic patterns of the Upper Pleistocene of Western Europe and the plain territory of Ukraine. This is important for the reconstruction of global climate change and the transformation of natural and man-made geosystems.


Legal Concept ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 195-204
Author(s):  
Alexey Anisimov ◽  
◽  
Olga Popova ◽  

Introduction: the paper examines the problems associated with the definition of the legal regime of the technologies and products obtained using GMOs. The experts in the field of genetics have not yet come to an unambiguous conclusion about the degree of harm or benefit of products obtained using genetic modifications. Russia has strict restrictive measures for the production of genetically modified products. Consequently, there is virtually no market for genetically modified seeds produced in Russia. Nevertheless, the world is actively developing industries for the production of genetically modified agricultural products, and the market for the production of seeds is “captured” by a small number of foreign companies. On the other hand, climate change dictates the inevitability of using genetically modified products, the need to accelerate genetic research, and the production of GMO seeds and food. In this context, the authors set a goal to find a compromise (balanced) legal regulation of the legal regime of the technologies and products obtained using GMOs. Methods: the methodological framework for the research is a set of methods of scientific cognition, among which the formal-legal method and the method of comparative legal analysis are the leading positions. Results: the authors propose to consider the bans or support for GMO products in the context of trends in global climate change and ensuring food security. The authors have made a comparative analysis of the provisions of the international norms and the Russian legislation on the research and application of GMO technologies and products, which helped to identify an unbalanced legal regulation of the use of the GMO technologies in Russia, which reduces its competitiveness in this area on the world market. Conclusions: the Russian legislation needs to minimize this legal imbalance, which puts researchers in the field of plant genetics and producers of GMO seeds and food in unequal (worse) conditions. The legal regulation should ensure the coexistence of organic (environmentally friendly) agriculture, traditional agriculture, and the use of the GMO technologies; the introduction of special labeling of GMO products; the broadening of the powers of regional authorities in the use of GMO technologies; as well as the application of the principle of “traceability” to GMO products.


Author(s):  
Debbie Hopkins ◽  
James Higham

Since the turn of the 21st Century, the world has experienced unprecedented economic, political, social and environmental transformation. The ‘inconvenient truth’ of climate change is now undeniable; rising temperatures and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events have resulted in the loss of lives, livelihoods and habitats as well as straining economies. Increasingly mobile lives are often dependent on high carbon modes of transport, representing a substantial contribution to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the underlying cause of anthropogenic climate change. With growing demand and rising emissions, the transport sector has a critical role to play in achieving GHG emissions reductions, and stabilising the global climate. Low Carbon Mobility Transitions draws interdisciplinary insights on transport and mobilities, as a vast and complex socio-technical system. It presents 15 chapters and 6 shorter ‘case studies’ covering a diversity of themes and geographic contexts across three thematic sections: People and Place, Structures in Transition, and Innovations for Low Carbon Mobility. The three sections are highly interrelated, and with overlapping, complementing, and challenging themes. The contributions offer critical, often neglected insights into low carbon mobility transitions across the world. In doing so, Low Carbon Mobility Transitions sheds light on the place- and context-specific nature of mobility in a climate constrained world.


Author(s):  
Shaikh Mohammad Kais

Global aquaculture is one of the key features of present global agro-food systems. Though aquaculture is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, its growth trajectory is confronted with various challenges including climate disruptions. Since both aquaculture and climate change have regional variations, their interconnections are very complex and require systematic investigation. In various regions of the world, especially in the Global South, aquaculture countries are assessing those interconnections and devising resilience-enhancing programs for the development of the sector. Thorough investigations are required for a comprehensive understanding of the complex interconnections between climate vulnerability and resilience of global aquaculture. Drawing on primary and secondary data from the Bangladesh shrimp sector, and using conceptual lenses of global climate change and resilience, this chapter critically examines how the industrial shrimp aquaculture in Bangladesh is affected by climate disruptions and how the shrimp farming communities address these challenges.


Author(s):  
Shaikh Mohammad Kais

Global aquaculture is one of the key features of present global agro-food systems. Though aquaculture is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, its growth trajectory is confronted with various challenges including climate disruptions. Since both aquaculture and climate change have regional variations, their interconnections are very complex and require systematic investigation. In various regions of the world, especially in the Global South, aquaculture countries are assessing those interconnections and devising resilience-enhancing programs for the development of the sector. Thorough investigations are required for a comprehensive understanding of the complex interconnections between climate vulnerability and resilience of global aquaculture. Drawing on primary and secondary data from the Bangladesh shrimp sector, and using conceptual lenses of global climate change and resilience, this chapter critically examines how the industrial shrimp aquaculture in Bangladesh is affected by climate disruptions and how the shrimp farming communities address these challenges.


Urban Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 129-138
Author(s):  
Patrick L. Kinney

Global climate change represents one of the sentinel changes the world is facing and that will threaten population health in this century. In the context of urban health, climate change threatens to increase urban heat island effects, to change exposure to pollution, and to increase urban residents’ risk of exposure to natural disasters, among other phenomena. And yet urban innovation is central to the longer term solution to climate change from the development of innovative approaches that reduce cities’ carbon footprint to initiatives that increase urban resilience in the face of climate change threats. This chapter discusses the threat that climate change poses for urban populations and potential approaches that can mitigate this challenge toward improving urban health.


Author(s):  
Michael H. Fox

We, the teeming billions of people on earth, are changing the earth’s climate at an unprecedented rate because we are spewing out greenhouse gases and are heading to a disaster, say most climate scientists. Not so, say the skeptics. We are just experiencing normal variations in earth’s climate and we should all take a big breath, settle down, and worry about something else. Which is it? A national debate has raged for the last several decades about whether anthropogenic (man-made) sources of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and other so-called “greenhouse gases“ (primarily methane and nitrous oxide) are causing the world to heat up. This phenomenon is usually called “global warming,” but it is more appropriate to call it “global climate change,” since it is not simply an increase in global temperatures but rather more complex changes to the overall climate. Al Gore is a prominent spokesman for the theory that humans are causing an increase in greenhouse gases leading to global climate change. His movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, gave the message widespread awareness and resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize for him in 2008. However, the message also led to widespread criticism. On the one hand are a few scientists and a large segment of the general American public who believe that there is no connection between increased CO2 in the atmosphere and global climate change, or if there is, it is too expensive to do anything about it, anyway. On the other hand is an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists who have produced enormous numbers of research papers demonstrating that increased CO2 is changing the earth’s climate. The scientific consensus is expressed most clearly in the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 by the United Nations–sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the fourth in a series of reports since 1990. The IPCC began as a group of scientists meeting in Geneva in November 1988 to discuss global climate issues under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.


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