CropBooster‐P: Towards a roadmap for plant research to future‐proof crops in Europe

The world needs more than double its current agricultural productivity by 2050
to produce enough food and feed, as well as to provide feedstock for the bioeconomy.
These future increases will not only need to be sustainable but also need
to compromise the nutritional quality, and ideally also need to decrease greenhouse
gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration to help mitigate the
consequences of global climate change. These challenges could be tackled by developing
and integrating new future-proof
crops into our food system. The H2020
CropBooster-P
project sets out plant-centered
breeding approaches guided by a
broad socio-economic
and societal support. First, the potential approaches for
breeding crops with sustainably increased yields adapted to the future climate of
Europe are identified. These crop-breeding
options are subsequently prioritized
and their adoption considered by experts across the agri-food
system and the
wider public, taking into account environmental, economic and other technical
criteria. In this way, a specific research agenda to future-proof
our crops was developed,
supported by an eventual implementation plan.