Jornal de Ciência do Solo e Saúde Vegetal

Using Soil-Plant Interactions for Climate Change Mitigation

Mykola Miroshnychenko

Future increase in crop production will greatly depend on how effectively agriculture adapts to climate changes. There are developed a lot of adaptive measures for agriculture to respond to extreme changes of weather conditions, namely, technological farming methods, political adaptation plans of action and research projects. A strategy of adapting agriculture to climate change has already been developed or at the design stage in a number of countries. In most case these strategies include actions favouring major changes in land use, such as a switch to growing biomass crops, afforestation or significant changes in livestock production approaches. However, traditional measures of mitigation climate change don’t take into account the importance of water-nutrients interaction. For instance, only 16 from 138 research projects at the European Climate Adaption Platform are related to soils, and only one examined soil-plant interaction at least partially [1]. Unfortunately, investigations regarding the main directions of adaptation of plant production to extreme weathers don’t follow a multidisciplinary approach, as each issue is considered separately. On the contrary, combine the methodology of soil science, agrochemistry, plant physiology and microbiology allows to create new possibilities for enhance resilience of soil-plant system to abiotic stresses.