Global Warming, Climate Change, and Environmental Pollution: Recipe for a Multifactorial Stress Combination Disaster

2021/03/19 by Sara I. Zandalinas, Felix Fritschi, Ron Mittler · 12 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Plant responses to elevated CO2 #Climate change impacts on agriculture #Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.tplants.2021.02.011

openalex publication_date 2021/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Global warming, climate change, and environmental pollution present plants with unique combinations of different abiotic and biotic stresses. Although much is known about how plants acclimate to each of these individual stresses, little is known about how they respond to a combination of many of these stress factors occurring together, namely a multifactorial stress combination. Recent studies revealed that increasing the number of different co-occurring multifactorial stress factors causes a severe decline in plant growth and survival, as well as in the microbiome biodiversity that plants depend upon. This effect should serve as a dire warning to our society and prompt us to decisively act to reduce pollutants, fight global warming, and augment the tolerance of crops to multifactorial stress combinations.

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