Genomic Solutions for Breeding Climate-resilient Crops: Unlocking Nature's Blueprint Sustainable Agriculture

This book assesses the promise of genomic breeding for developing improved crops with increased yield and greater resilience to the challenges expected with projected climate shifts. Climate change is exerting profound and increasingly complex pressures on global agriculture, threatening food security, ecosystem viability and rural livelihoods worldwide. While past gains in crop productivity have been realized largely using fertilizers, agrochemicals, and intensive farming practices, these methods rely on finite resources and pose long-term environmental and economic sustainability challenges. In this context, recent advancements in genomics are transforming crop improvement by facilitating a shift from input-intensive practices toward knowledge-driven, climate-smart and sustainable agricultural systems. The rapid expansion of high-quality crop reference genomes, driven by the widespread adoption of high-throughput sequencing, long-read technologies and advanced assembly platforms, has ushered in the era of pangenomes and super-pangenomes. These genomic frameworks capture the full spectrum of allelic, structural and haplotypic diversity, providing unprecedented opportunities to discover, deploy and stack climate-adaptive traits. As a result, genomics-assisted breeding is now enabling the precise identification of quantitative trait loci, genomic regions and genes associated with abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, as well as improved resource-use efficiency and yield stability. This book provides a comprehensive and forward-looking synthesis of how climate change is reshaping agriculture and how cutting-edge genomic technologies can be leveraged to deliver resilient, high-performing and environmentally sustainable crops. It will appeal to researchers in plant genetics, breeding and genomics, and also to crop breeders, plant biotechnologists, environmental scientists and policymakers. Climate change is exerting profound and increasingly complex pressures on global agriculture, threatening food security, ecosystem viability and rural livelihoods worldwide. While past gains in crop productivity have been realized largely using fertilizers, agrochemicals, and intensive farming practices, these methods rely on finite resources and pose long-term environmental and economic sustainability challenges. In this context, recent advancements in genomics are transforming crop improvement by facilitating a shift from input-intensive practices toward knowledge-driven, climate-smart and sustainable agricultural systems. The rapid expansion of high-quality crop reference genomes, driven by the widespread adoption of high-throughput sequencing, long-read technologies and advanced assembly platforms, has ushered in the era of pangenomes and super-pangenomes. These genomic frameworks capture the full spectrum of allelic, structural and haplotypic diversity, providing unprecedented opportunities to discover, deploy and stack climate-adaptive traits. As a result, genomics-assisted breeding is now enabling the precise identification of quantitative trait loci, genomic regions and genes associated with abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, as well as improved resource-use efficiency and yield stability. This book provides a comprehensive and forward-looking synthesis of how climate change is reshaping agriculture and how cutting-edge genomic technologies can be leveraged to deliver resilient, high-performing and environmentally sustainable crops. It will appeal to researchers in plant genetics, breeding and genomics, and also to crop breeders, plant biotechnologists, environmental scientists and policymakers.