An Overview of the Impact of Climate Change on Pathogens, Pest of Crops on Sustainable Food Biosecurity

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities on the environment have intensified in the last century resulting in a devastating increase in greenhouse gases and triggering global climate oscillation. Global food productions have increase significantly by 50% in order to meet the anticipated demand of the world’s population by 2050. The challenges of food production increases are high and even harder if climate change as a global threat is not addressed. In the coming years, there could be more changes in the biosecurity of food crops due to escalating global climate change. The effects of climate change on plant pathogens and the diseases they cause have been reported in some pathosystems. Climatic changes have been predicted to affect pathogen development and survival rates with possible modification of host susceptibility, host-pathogen-vector interaction that could lead to changes in the impact of diseases on food crops. The climate change may affect not only the optimal conditions for infection but also host specificity and mechanisms of plant infection. Changes in the abiotic conditions are known to affect the microclimate surrounding plants and the susceptibility of plants to disease. These changing conditions are expected to affect microbial communities in the soil and canopy pathosystems, with the possibility of altering the beneficial effects of these communities. Since both the pathogens and host plants could be affected by the dramatic changes in the magnitude of disease expression in a given pathosystem, the geographical distribution of particular plant diseases, their economic importance in a given location, and the set of diseases that infect each crop are crucial to understand their etiology and level of virulence. These changes could affect the measures farmers take to efficiently manage these diseases, as well as the feasibility of cropping systems in particular regions. This review examines the effects of changes in temperature, CO2 and ozone concentrations, precipitation, and drought on the biology of pathogens and their ability to infect plants and survival in natural and agricultural environments. We also underpin the multiple aspects linked to the effects of climate change on crop plant diseases, including the impact of increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other gases, and how diseases can change under the alteration of atmospheric gases conditions in the future.