Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions.

“The potential is huge,” says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her role in the discovery. “There is a coming revolution right now with CRISPR.”

The grand hope is that CRISPR’s ability to precisely remove specific parts of the DNA within the existing genomes of plants and animals will make it faster and easier to create climate-resilient crops and livestock, avoiding many of the pitfalls of earlier breeding and editing techniques. The added promise is that the resulting products may prove more appealing to the public since they often won’t carry DNA from other organisms—and won’t be labeled as bioengineered.

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