The challenge
Future environmental changes resulting from climate change are predicted to:
- Reduce yields and nutritional value of many crops including vegetables, legumes, fruit, nuts and seeds;
- Increase crop losses due to insect pests and plant diseases: for vector-borne crop viruses, both insect population dynamics and viral transmission can be affected by climatic factors;
- Profoundly affect Africa.
Malnutrition from restricted diets reduces resilience against contagious diseases and is the leading driver of non-contagious diseases worldwide: 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, particularly vitamin A, folate, iron and zinc. Nutritious crops including tomato, cucurbits (squash/gourds), and eggplant are significantly impacted by vector-borne viruses.
What we're doing
We’re exploring the extent to which maintaining the traditional African diet is possible in the face of vector-borne virus impacts on crops, such as nutritious crop yield losses. We’re also looking into the relative risks of nutritionally-important crop losses and the resulting micronutrient losses across Sub-Saharan African countries, taking the first steps in identifying ‘hot spots’ of regional nutritional restriction due to vector-borne crop viruses.
How it helps
The project aims to better understand social responses to, and the implications of, dietary impacts of vector-borne plant viruses. We also aim to identify risk factors for geographical hot spots of vector-borne crop viruses occurring that could impact regional nutritious crop availability as a result of changing weather and climate patterns.
We hope to build a pipeline of risk analysis, which will be translated into an open-access web-based mapping tool. This will ideally result in an impact-based matrix identifying the likelihood of varying levels of impact, which can be integrated with existing and emerging climate tools, information and services for managing crop pests and diseases. This will help plant health organisations to target surveillance, diagnostics and plant health interventions in regions in greatest need.
Lead researcher profile
Dr. Nina Ockendon-Powell, Research Associate in Biological Sciences
Investigators
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Dr Angeliki Papadaki, Policy Studies
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Dr Dan Bernie, Population Health Sciences
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Dr Nina Ockendon-Powell, Biological Sciences
Funders
Funding for this project has kindly been provided by the University of Bristol US Foundation.