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.