Climate change is expected to enormously affect life on the Earth. It will cause
drastic changes in the environment and ecology and thus will severely impact
agriculture. Therefore, it poses a serious challenge for global food security. It is
expected to cause drastic changes in agroclimatic conditions including temperature,
rainfall, soil nutrients and health, and incidence of pathogens and pests leading to
striking reduction in crop yields due to global warming, water scarcity, changes of
rainfall patterns resulting in increasingly frequent drought and flood, and other
extreme weather events. Plant pathogens and pests may also evolve quickly with
more virulent pathotypes and biotypes and so may extend their geographical spread
leading to epidemics and severity due to climate change. Furthermore, elevated
CO2 levels will also reduce the nutritional quality of most crops and some crops
may even become more toxic due to changes in the chemical composition of their
tissues. Climate change will also cause elevation of greenhouse gas emission. The
most grave and still unknown concern, however, involves the critical effects that
interactions among various biotic and abiotic excesses or paucities will have on
crops and cropping systems making the task of feeding a world population of nine
billion by 2050 extremely challenging.
Several eminent scientists from different parts of the world are planning to put
significant effort into combating or mitigating the threat to food security due to
climate change. We organized an international workshop on Climate Change
during the 20th International Conference on the Status of Plant and Animal Genome
Research (PAG conference) held during January 2012 in San Diego, California and
established the International Climate Resilient Crop Genomics Consortium
(ICRCGC) with a membership of over 30 active scientists from over ten countries
(http://www.climatechangegenomics.org). Recently, many more scientists have
become interested in this critical topic and we organized a special international
workshop on Genomics and Breeding of Climate-Resilient Crops for Future Food
Security during the 6th International Crop Science Congress held during August
6–10, 2012 in Bento Goncalves, Brazil followed by a brain-storming discussion
to formulate the future strategies and work plans for combating climate change.
We recently organized another two workshops on this subject in January 2013 in San Diego, California during the 21st PAG conference. ICRCGC is now preparing a
white paper for more serious and broad dialogs to initiate international and multidisciplinary
efforts to combat climate change using genetic resources and advanced
genomics and breeding tools.
The central strategy of combating climate change will obviously involve the
development of climate-resilient crop cultivars with broader genome plasticity
allowing wider adaptability, broader genome elasticity with potential for high
response to phenotypic, chemotypic, and molecular selection and above all durable
and robust resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, genomics and breeding
for climate-resilient crops are relatively new fields of study and research and
given the seriousness of the threats of climate change will obviously be included in
course curricula in academic institutes and in frontier programs of agricultural
research organizations at national and international levels. This topic is expected
to be of increasing interest to policy-makers, social activists, and both public and
private sector agencies supporting agricultural research. There are a few critical and
comprehensive reviews on this subject and a number of publications are also
available on the assessment of the impact of climate change on agriculture and
suggested strategies to circumvent the severe effects to ensure food security. These
deliberations are, however, scattered over the pages of newspapers, newsletters,
journals, and web sites. Hence, a compilation of narratives on the concepts,
strategies, tools, and related issues was felt to be lacking and this was the guiding
force behind the inception of his two-volume work on Genomics and Breeding for
Climate-Resilient Crops.