As the race to adapt to climate change quickens, a South African scientist is leading global research into developing crops that mimic the extraordinary survival skills of "resurrection plants."
Jill Farrant, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, hopes that unlocking the genetic codes of drought-tolerant plants could help farmers toiling in increasingly hot and dry conditions.
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With more than 130 known varieties in the world, resurrection plants are a unique group of flora that can survive extreme water shortages for years.
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During a drought, the plant acts like a seed, becoming so dry it appears dead.
But when the skies finally open and the rain pours down, the shriveled plant bursts "back to life", turning green and robust in just a few hours.
"I want to cater to the subsistence farmer, the person who wants to make enough food to live," Farrant, 55, said. "Farmers are becoming more and more dispirited, and droughts are killing them."
Perhaps the most well-known resurrection plant is Myrothamnus flabellifolius, which makes antioxidant chemicals to protect it during dry spells and is used in fashion designer Giorgio Armani's cosmetics line.
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- A life passion - A farmer's daughter, Farrant recalls stumbling across a resurrection plant as a nine-year-old and being amazed at its seemingly immortal properties.
"I wrote in my diary about a plant that had died and came back after the rain," she said.
She returned to the subject professionally in 1994, and has since become the world's leading expert in her field.
Environmentalists fear that more and more of Africa will be reduced to a dust bowl by global warming, with higher temperatures, reduced water supplies and population growth threatening to trigger worsening famines.
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Climate change could reduce maize yields across southern Africa by as much as 30 percent by 2030, according to the UN Environment Programme.
Ahead of the United Nations conference in Paris at the end of November, countries are facing growing pressure to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution levels by weaning their carbon-hungry societies off fossil fuels.
But, scientists say it is just as important to adapt to the new reality.
"Soil, cropping systems, farming systems - they all must have the capacity to recover from a drastic change in climate," said Rattan Lal, professor of soil science at Ohio State University.
"We should make agriculture part of the solution to our issues... the climate change problem is so huge everything should be on the table."
If successful, Farrant will follow in the venerable footsteps of earlier scientists who have saved crops from devastation by exploiting plants with specific strengths.
In the 1970s, US maize was rescued from southern leaf blight disease by incorporating resistant genes found in other varieties of maize.
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- Adapt to survive - Farrant has recently focused her research on teff, a grass native to Ethiopia whose seed has been used as a stable food in the region for centuries.
She hopes to make it more resilient by activating genes she discovered by studying resurrection plants.
"My main aim all along is to make crops that can improve drought tolerance," Farrant said. "If we get the money, I would say in 10 to 15 years we've got a product."
Experts warn that drought-tolerant crops are not a one-stop solution to the world's climate problems or even a safeguard against hunger.
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"Food security doesn't only depend on climate, it depends on markets and trade, prices and access by households to food," said Jim Verdin, a drought scientist with the US Geological Survey based in Boulder, Colorado.
Still, Farrant - who won a UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2012 - believes her work is a step in the right direction.
If she can harness the power of resurrection plants, farmers themselves may have a better chance of survival.
"If it doesn't rain, it doesn't matter, at least your plants won't die," she said. "The moment they get rain, they're ready to go."
Ongoing water shortages around the world, along with recent drought conditions in the western United States, have resulted in a flood of new research and proposals around water technology. We take a look at some concepts -- from simple to complex to rather ancient -- that are designed to help us collect, store, transport and even create water where it's needed most.
The severe drought in California -- now in its third year -- has triggered new interest in a relatively old technology. Desalination plants turn seawater into drinking water by way of high pressure valves and semi-permeable membranes. Traditionally an expensive and energy-intensive process, recent innovations have made desalination a more viable option. The city of Carlsbad, Calif., is set to open the biggest
in the Western Hemisphere later this year.
Desalination plants are efficient, relatively speaking, but they're not very pretty. A couple years back, IBM and Airlight Energy turned heads with their
High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal
(HCPVT) system, designed to generate solar power and desalinate water at the same time. The sunflower-shaped solar collectors use a liquid cooling system that could potentially double as a small-scale desalination plant, providing both energy and water for apartment buildings, hotels or hospitals.
Water recycling is the umbrella term for reuse and reclamation systems that involve treating wastewater and returning it to underground aquifers or reservoirs. Along with desalination, it's among the existing technologies being optimized for large-scale use. San Diego's
project, for example, treats wastewater with three different techniques -- membrane filtration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet disinfection -- before piping the recycled water back into reservoirs.
One nice thing is that water generating systems tend to scale down nicely. This
water-harvesting billboard in Lima, Peru, uses dehumidifiers to pull moisture out of the atmosphere. Then a drip irrigation system waters the adjacent garden, producing more than 2.500 heads of lettuce per week. The billboard was built by -- and advertises -- Lima's University of Engineering and Technology.
The Air Orchard is just one of several clever self-advertising projects the university has built to advocate engineering solutions to environmental issues. This
also pulls moisture from the air -- Lima's average humidity is around 80 percent year-round -- and turns it into drinkable water provided by a dispenser at the base.
Lima is the kind of town that doesn't mess around. As the second largest desert city in the world (behind Cairo), it has faced water problems for centuries. A new initiative by the city's water utility plans to
to bring water down from rivers in the Andes. It's something of a fixer-upper project: The canals were built by pre-Incan civilizations between 500 and 1,000 AD.
The concept of harvesting water with fog nets has been around a long time and some ambitious large-scale projects have been tested across the globe, most notably in
. A few years back, German design student Imke Hoehler proposed a design for portable and collapsible tent-like fog nets that could potentially harvest up to 20 liters of water per day under the right conditions.
Then there are the research projects that get
In March, a team of Japanese scientists proposed studying the microscopic workings of certain moisture-gathering plants to design the next generation of water collection systems. Electron microscope imagery reveals that such plants use cone shaped hairs to catch and store water, then change shape release the moisture in dry conditions. The team hopes advanced fiber technology could essentially replicate the process.
Global droughts and water shortages can seem like terrifying, insurmountable problems. But fear not. As with so many things in this world, William Shatner has our back. The actor and
recently proposed a plan to pipe water from the Pacific Northwest to arid sections of California by way of -- well, the details are
. But long-distance water pipelines have a
in the U.S. and several new projects are in various stages of proposal. And let it never be said that Shatner doesn't follow through: He recently launched the
website, dedicated to exploring the issue.
Designed and built by the Washington-based engineering firm, Janicki Bioenergy, the very official-sounding Omniprocessor S100 uses heat from sludge to make water. A trial run is underway in Dakar, Senegal, where the machine -- which has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- is processing sewage from a community of about 100,000 people. The sewage is first heated intensely to dry it and then during the process, the water vapor is captured, heavily processed and turned into drinking water.