(Bloomberg Creative via Getty Images)

This story originally appeared in the Morning Brief email newsletter. Sign up hereto get more stories like this and weekday weather updates from The Weather Channel and our meteorologists.

Tropical fruits are delicious. They are also vulnerable to climate change. To learn more, I talked to Dr. Varshney, a professor at Australia’s Murdoch University who is part of a team working to create more resilient tropical fruits. Here's our conversation, edited for clarity.

What tropical fruits are vulnerable to climate change?

Tropical fruits such as bananas, passionfruit, custard apples, papaya. The threat of climate change brings with it an enormous disruption to the food and plants we depend on for food. We are responsible for creating resilient crop varieties that can thrive amidst changing climatic conditions.

What is it about climate change that could pose a threat to tropical fruits?

As we have already seen, especially here in Australia, our weather patterns are changing. Droughts have become more severe, heat waves and fires have intensified, and intense rainfall and floods are more common. Some areas have less winter rainfall, and the ocean temperature is also rising.

The changing climate and the amplified instability make it a challenge for fruit growers to plan effectively, leading to reduced crop productivity. We need to make our crop varieties resilient to climate change so that they can deliver more yield.

Traditional methods of developing resilient crop varieties are time-consuming, taking up to 10-15 years, which is not feasible given the urgency. The Australian fruit industry has already seen large-scale losses of young fruit trees or seasons where the heat is destroying fruits such as strawberries. As winters get warmer, we could see an obvious decline in apple, pear, cherry and nut yields. That is because these trees are usually dormant during cold periods. However, if the weather is not cold enough, they do not grow and develop normally – this is a concern.

What particular challenges do fruit growers face when it comes to planning for climate change?

The challenges that fruit growers face, especially regarding climate change, are their (existing) ability to tolerate heat and cold and drought. We appreciate that we must adapt our food sources to withstand the rapidly changing climate, produce attractive yields, feed the world, and taste fantastic too!

What are some possible solutions to this problem?

My team are working on several methods and developing cutting-edge tools, such as genome maps and genetic selection tools, to address these challenges. These methods inform us of ways in which vital traits are coded and can be manipulated. Invariably, this helps us improve drought and heat tolerance in target crops, which will be highly beneficial in the future. For this purpose, we are developing 'Advanced Genomics Platform' in collaboration with Hort Innovation. This platform aims to deliver genetic solutions that will be done by sequencing and mining the genomes of five important tropical fruits, including banana, custard apple, pineapple, passionfruit and papaya with the goal of creating climate-resilient cultivars.

Also, we are working on accurately forecasting climate-resilient traits against the predicted climate changes in our fruit-growing regions. From this, we can map the usefulness of these traits by statistically testing the correlation between different genes and plant traits.

There will be some direct applications for growers from our platform and some indirect applications. As part of this Platform, we will develop some gene chips, and by using them, fruit breeders can accelerate their breeding process for developing improved crop varieties with higher resilience to climate change. In this way, growers will have better crop varieties, well suited to climate change in coming years. Second, these gene chips can also be beneficial from a biosecurity perspective.

We believe that there will be a lot of indirect benefits because the breeders will use this platform to develop varieties that the growers need. So, the growers will guide the development of improved varieties, which will have higher drought tolerance, higher heat tolerance, and appropriate fruit size and taste as per the need of consumers. The benefits of these efforts will not only be seen at an agronomic or grower levelwhich will provide better food security and more consistent crop cycles for a more stable supply to domestic and export markets, but there is also a potential for better tasting varieties for consumers that cater to their preferences.

We also aim to foster the next generation of scientists to take crop improvement to the next level by integrating genomics research into breeding. We want Australia to be a leader in genomics-assisted breeding, especially in horticulture crops at the global level – and this is a perfect time.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, .