The UN Environment Programme has confirmed that global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the limit agreed in Paris in 2015. This finding comes as policymakers gather at the UN COP31 climate conference in Antalya, Turkey, following the COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, which reaffirmed that the world faces a biodiversity crisis.
Researchers across scientific disciplines argue that biotechnology advances could help address these dual crises. Gene editing and germplasm mining, the analysis of large libraries of plant-genome sequences to identify useful traits for crop improvement, can now be deployed to tackle global warming and protect nature, according to scientists writing in a climate-themed issue of Nature Biotechnology.