The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) organized a seminar on role of plant breeding and  plant variety protection in enabling agricultural to mitigate and adapt to climate change on Oct 11, 12, and 26, 2022. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the seminar was held online in Geneva, Switzerland. 70 representatives from 20 countries and organizations attended the meeting, including 5 Chinese representatives from the DUS Testing Centers for New Plant Varieties of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Dr. Zhang Yu, from the Institute of Agro-food Standards and Testing Technology, SAAS, was invited to give a presentation entitled "Plant new variety protection system and the cultivation of water-saving and drought-resistant rice".

Due to factors such as climate change, soil salinization and greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, changes in crop growth, distribution, and plant morphology have led to major changes in the breeding direction in many countries around the world. As a professional institution, the DUS Testing Center (Shanghai) for New Plant Varieties of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, SAAS, is obliged to promote the development for plant breeding and intellectual property protection of new varieties for our academy in China and across the globe, which benefits the people all over the world. In this context, the presentation of Dr. Zhang Yu showed the impact of climate change on crop production, laid a good foundation and provided an important reference for whether these traits of crop response to abiotic stress can be used as selected traits in the future.