GMO V. HUNGER:

Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, rice is a staple, both culturally and practically. A Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimate found that more than 16 percent of all the calories consumed in the world come from rice. But it's also deeply susceptible to climate change: Rice doesn't like higher temperatures, and some estimates have found that crop yields could fall 40 percent by 2100 if nothing is done. Plus, rice yields actually need to increase to offset expected population growth and rapid urbanization of the world, which changes global priorities for land use.

Luckily, Jane Langdale is doing something.

Faced with the destruction climate change is certain to wreak on the world, some of us hide under our beds composing poems about the apocalypse. Others try to make sure that, even if the climate does shift, vulnerable people -- and, crucially, their food sources -- are protected.

Langdale, a professor of plant development at Oxford University, is the coordinator for the C4 Rice Project, a global push to make sure rice remains a viable crop through a very specific scientific process. Simply put: Plants absorb carbon dioxide. About 95 percent of plant species, including rice, extract the carbon from those molecules via a process known as C3. But about 3 percent of species, including maize and sorghum, do it through a different process known as C4. Plants that use the C4 process are more resistant to extreme heat and drought. So Langdale's project is attempting to turn rice into one of those plants.

"What we're trying to do, given that crops are going to be growing in the future in conditions with less water and higher temperatures, is to try and convert rice from using the ancestral C3 pathway," she says. Doing that could double the plant's water efficiency and yield.

"The headline is that it should contribute in a big way to food security to many of the most vulnerable people on the planet," explains Julian Hibberd, another scientist working on the C4 rice project.

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