JERRY: I'm in a glasshouse and living laboratory
at the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland,
where scientists are studying hundreds of taro,
trying to unlock the secrets
that will lead to a new generation
suited to the challenges of climate change.
Taro is one of the earliest cultivated crops
and it's grown all around the world
in warm, moist, humid conditions.
It's a significant crop.
In 2018, there was 10 million tonnes produced.
Now, this crop is versatile.
It's mostly grown for this - the starchy, sustaining root.
But you can also eat the leaves and the stems.
And which parts you eat all depend on where you are and your culture,
because this is a culturally significant staple crop.
Dr Millicent Smith is a lecturer in crop physiology
at the University of Queensland.
She's part of a dedicated team
working to secure the future of taro.
Well, around the world, taro is really impacted
by biotic, or living, stresses, so disease and pests.
But it's also very impacted by changes in the environment,
so increasing temperature, drought and salinity
is also a really big stress around the world.
Perhaps nowhere is the reality of climate change clearer
than in the Pacific Islands.
MAN: We're talking about places like Tonga, Samoa,
Fiji, the French Polynesia, New Caledonia.
Low-lying atolls generally in a geographic sense
are the places that are most prone
to salt inundation from rising sea levels.
And that could pose a serious food security threat,
because taro is eaten worldwide.
(CURIOUS MUSIC)
Dr Bradley Campbell is also a member of Team Taro.
He's a research fellow at UQ in plant molecular biology
and is working closely with our Pacific Island neighbours
to create futureproof varieties of taro.
We have up to 2,000 different taros from all around the world,
1,600 of which would be from the Pacific Islands themselves.
And we want to screen those
and, from that, create new varieties that farmers can use
to adapt them to things like fungal contamination -
so, taro leaf blight.
But in our sense, we're worried about climate change-related traits
like drought, salinity, those sorts of things.
Which is why I find myself here in a canoe with Millie and Brad
at Colleges Crossing on the Brisbane River.
The first project is looking at wild and weedy taros and native taros
that are growing around the waterways of South-East Queensland.
And we're curating those to find
any taros that can grow in swampy or salty areas
and might have tolerance to salinity.
All along the Brisbane River and its catchments,
taro thrives along the muddy embankments,
and it's these which are historic varieties
that may hold a clue.
In the upper reaches where it's more fresh water,
you find a lot higher frequency of taro,
but as you get closer to the ocean, of course it gets saltier.
We're more interested in those taros
that are surviving in brackish waters.
Yeah, so we think those closer to the ocean
will have different characteristics to those here,
that allow them to survive in that environment.
So, our hope is to try and understand
how they're coping with that salty water
and then translate that information to Fiji and our partners there
so they can develop better varieties.
As part of the research project,
Millie and her team have been taking different taro plants
collected over decades
and subjecting them to varying degrees of salinity
and seeing which ones survive.
So, what are you investigating here?
Yeah, so, these are pots within pots, basically,
and inside this bottle
is the amount of water and salt that we want to give it.
So, we let it drip out
and it creates a sort of simulated watertable
which allows us to simulate rising sea levels.
And we measure how much water is used every day by the plants
so we can understand how they're responding
to the salinity in the soil.
We also use cheap cameras that are on the roof
that allow us to measure the temperature
of each individual plant
and we can get information from that
that tells us how they're responding to the stress.
It looks very simple technology.
Yeah, it is quite simple,
and simple is always best in science if you can do it.
And it also means that with this low-cost and high-throughput method,
we can share it with our partners in Fiji.
They can easily implement it within their glasshouse systems,
and we can get more data from around the world.
The hope is these Brisbane-based taro populations
may hold the key
to keep the crop going in a not-so-distant-future climate.
When it comes to the uptake of the new varieties of taro,
what would be the ideal taro?
BRADLEY: Well, the ideal taro would have qualities
that made it easy to grow for growers,
that it was robust
and it could deal with challenging climactic conditions,
but at the same time you can't neglect taste and cooking qualities.
And, you know, it's pointless creating a new variety
that no-one wants to eat.
The future of growing crops is uncertain,
but one thing is definite -
as our climate changes,
crops will have to cope with harsher, more variable conditions.
It's humbling to think
that the solution to feeding millions of people
may lie here on the muddy banks of the Brisbane River
just waiting patiently for someone to discover them.