Grant: Alliance Grants

One of the biggest challenges we face today is stabilizing food production in the face of climate fluctuations and extreme, unpredictable weather. Climate change has already reduced food production in the last 60 years and is projected to worsen in the future. Ensuring food security for a growing global population while mitigating climate change and preserving nature and biodiversity is the biggest grand challenge of our generation. State-of-the-art crop improvements and the development of new cultivars take years to decades, while abiotic and biotic threats to crop production are rapidly increasing in frequency and magnitude. Moreover, the gold standard practice for increasing crop productivity has relied on irrigation, tilling, and synthetic fertilizers, which are non-sustainable and damaging to our natural resources and ecosystems. To address this grand challenge, our Center will convene plant, microbial, computational, and social scientists from the US, the Republic of Korea (ROK), the UK, Japan, and Canada to discover natural products from plants and microbes that will sustainably enhance plant and soil health for agriculture. We will engage industry, commodity, and grower partners to co-design and assess the success of the Center and address new technology adoption and the diffusion of knowledge while strengthening trust and buy-in from our stakeholders and the public. The mission of our Global Center is to leverage natural chemical diversity to find rapid solutions for ensuring the stability of crop production against climate fluctuations, pests, pathogen epidemics, and pandemics. As an integrated, multi-national, and trans-disciplinary Center, we will train the next-generation of leaders in the bioeconomy and green agriculture and engage stakeholders to prioritize the most pressing needs on the ground and to facilitate technology adoption and trust building.