Economic Uses of Salt-Tolerant Plants

Climate change is likely to affect the ability of world agricultural systems to provide food, fibre, and fuel for the growing world population, especially since the area of salinised land will increase. However, as few species of plants (less than 1% of all plant species) can tolerate saline soils, we believe it is important to evaluate their potential as crops for salinised soils. We have analysed the economic and potential economic uses of plants that are listed in the database eHALOPH, including the most tolerant species, halophytes. For nine main categories of economic value, we found a total of 1365 uses amongst all species listed in eHALOPH as of July 2022; this number reduced to 918 amongst halophytes. We did not find any obvious differences in rankings between the more tolerant halophytes and the whole group of salt-tolerant plants, where the order of use was medical, followed by forage, traditional medicine, food and drink, fuel, fuelwood, and bioenergy. While many species are potentially important as crops, the effects of salt concentration on their uses are much less well documented. Increasing salt concentration can increase, decrease, or have no effect on the concentration of antioxidants found in different species, but there is little evidence on the effect of salinity on potential yield (the product of concentration and biomass). The effect of salinity on forage quality again varies with species, often being reduced, but the overall consequences for livestock production have rarely been evaluated. Salt-tolerant plants have potential uses in the bioremediation of degraded land (including revegetation, phytoremediation, and extraction of NaCl) as well as sources of biofuels, although any use of saline water for the sustainable irrigation of salt-tolerant crops must be viewed with extreme caution.