Improving Crops for Future Sustainability and Climate Resilience

This book addresses the need to develop future crops that are highly resilient and adaptable to fluctuating environmental conditions, in order to sustain global food security in the years ahead. Climate change is accelerating land degradation, disrupting global carbon and nitrogen cycles, intensifying pest and disease outbreaks, altering weather patterns and reducing crop productivity. To safeguard and sustain both food and ecosystem security, it is imperative to innovate and design future crops for agricultural sustainability. Emerging new breeding techniques (NBTs), including genomics-assisted breeding, genome editing and synthetic biology, are now being harnessed to create the crops of tomorrow. This book provides an outlook on 'crops for the future'. Chapters explore the complexity of the challenges, the demands of the evolving global scenario and the prerequisites for action that range from the domestication of forgotten orphan crops, to crops for extreme environments, bioenergy, nutritional security to the re-design of plants with desirable traits using advanced genomics tools. This volume is intended for professionals, researchers, policymakers and commercial entrepreneurs concerned with plant genetic diversity and breeding, with the goal of enhancing agricultural productivity and ensuring the sustainability of global food resources.