Stephen Long

Educator/Teacher, Environmentalist, Inventor, Scientist, Technologist, Writer/Editor

Steve is passionate about Photosynthesis. Why? It is the most important process on the planet. It has made much of what the planet is today, not least in providing the oxygen to support all aerobic life. It is the source, directly or indirectly, of all of our food and fuels nearly all of the Earth’s ecosystems and its biodiversity. Steve sees boosting photosynthesis as the possibility of solving three major problems. 1) Getting seed that will produce higher yields into the hands of the millions of small-holder farmers, often women, feeding their families and communities from tiny plots of land. 2) Protecting biodiversity by decreasing the agricultural footprint through increased yields on the best crop land. 3) Sequestering carbon from the atmosphere by combining increased photosynthetic CO2 assimilation with production of recalcitrant plant biomass that can store carbon in soils for many decades. Against much skepticism, Steve’s team has succeeded in bioengineering increased photosynthetic efficiency into crops which have now produced substantial yield increases in crops, including soybean. He is working now with a team that aims to add his patented traits, royalty free, into cowpea. Cowpea is a nitrogen fixing crop and the major vegetable protein source in much of West Africa. That team was the first to have a transgenic crop de-regulated and available to farmers in Nigeria and Ghana. Steve also founded the largest facility in the world for the study of climatic and atmospheric change on crops under open-air on farm conditions. This has revealed many of the impacts and now provides a means to test innovations in future-proofing of crops. In early work with the UN Environment Programme, Steve identified what is so far the most productive land plant known, a grass on the Amazon floodplain, representing a key resource for understanding the basis of its high productivity in its photosynthesis. Steve founded the journal Global Change Biology as a focal point for the understanding of effects on biodiversity, ecosystem services and the Earth System, together with means of adaptation and mitigation. As Chief Editor, Steve has seen the journal rise to be among the major sources of primary peer-reviewed information for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, to which he has been an author. In 2019 Steve founded a new not-for-profit journal, “in silico Plants” providing a focal point for the rapid growth in mathematical description, computer simulation and analysis of plant processes, with a focus on AI applications.

Addressing global food security and climate change, to avoid misery, and huge societal dislocation and disruption.

By boosting photosynthesis we can avert hunger for the most vulnerable, protect the environment by removing the need to take more land into food production and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

carbon sequestration, Climate change, computer simulation, Crop yield improvement, Photosynthesis

This is my first experience of TED, I am in awe and terrified, but hopeful that my message will get out and change the world for the better.

I am a jack of many trades, but perhaps master of none, except integrating them into visions and encouraging those who are good at the needed skills to join and realize that vision. But as a 70+ year-old adolescent I am still optimistic that when I do grow up I will find something that I'm good at.