Modern Breeding Approaches for Climate Change

Abstract

Climate-smart agriculture is the emerging and sustainable option to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change (on crop adaptability) before it significantly influences global crop production. Crop development through modern breeding techniques, effective agronomic practices and exploitation of natural variability in neglected and popular crops are all good ways to meet future food demands. However, the rapidly changing environment requires technological interventions to improve crop climate resilience. Technological advances such as genome-edited transgenic plants, high-throughput phenotyping technologies combined with next-generation sequencing techniques, big data analytics and advances in modern breeding techniques help modern agriculture progress towards robotics or digital conversion to face future environmental adversaries. For example, speed breeding in combination with genomic and phenomic methods can lead to quicker identification of genetic factors and, as a result, speed up crop development programmes. Furthermore, combining next-generation interdisciplinary breeding platforms might open up new opportunities for developing climate-ready crops. Several integrated modern breeding platforms were created in the last few decades and are now employed worldwide. Africa and Asia have adopted these most frequently used crop improvement platforms with advanced techniques like multitrait association studies using genome-wide association studies (GWASs). These have permitted precise exploration of the genetic make-up of agricultural attributes in most crops. This chapter explores various ways to increase crop output by developing climate-resilient superior genotypes. Further, we discussed how combinatorial advanced breeding technologies and biotechnological approaches would be used for managing climate change’s consequences to promote crops with climate resilience. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.