Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2019 Jan 30;8(2):34.
doi: 10.3390/plants8020034.

Impact of Climate Change on Crops Adaptation and Strategies to Tackle Its Outcome: A Review

Ali Raza  1 , Ali Razzaq  2 , Sundas Saher Mehmood  3 , Xiling Zou  4 , Xuekun Zhang  5 , Yan Lv  6 , Jinsong Xu  7
Affiliations
Review

Impact of Climate Change on Crops Adaptation and Strategies to Tackle Its Outcome: A Review

Ali Raza et al. Plants (Basel). .

Abstract

Agriculture and climate change are internally correlated with each other in various aspects, as climate change is the main cause of biotic and abiotic stresses, which have adverse effects on the agriculture of a region. The land and its agriculture are being affected by climate changes in different ways, e.g., variations in annual rainfall, average temperature, heat waves, modifications in weeds, pests or microbes, global change of atmospheric CO₂ or ozone level, and fluctuations in sea level. The threat of varying global climate has greatly driven the attention of scientists, as these variations are imparting negative impact on global crop production and compromising food security worldwide. According to some predicted reports, agriculture is considered the most endangered activity adversely affected by climate changes. To date, food security and ecosystem resilience are the most concerning subjects worldwide. Climate-smart agriculture is the only way to lower the negative impact of climate variations on crop adaptation, before it might affect global crop production drastically. In this review paper, we summarize the causes of climate change, stresses produced due to climate change, impacts on crops, modern breeding technologies, and biotechnological strategies to cope with climate change, in order to develop climate resilient crops. Revolutions in genetic engineering techniques can also aid in overcoming food security issues against extreme environmental conditions, by producing transgenic plants.

Keywords: climate change; crop adaptation; genetic engineering; genome wide association studies (GWAS); hormone responses; marker-assisted selection (MSA); molecular breeding; physiological responses.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Direct, indirect and socio-economic effects of climate change on agricultural production.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Increasing number of extreme climate-related events occurred during 1990–2016. Source: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) based on data from Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) (https://www.emdat.be/) [24,25].
Figure 3
Figure 3
The number of publications per year related to abiotic and biotic stresses from Jan/1990–Nov/2018. Source: PubMed (Keywords (abiotic stresses, drought, cold, heat, salinity and water-logging), (biotic stresses, bacteria, virus, fungi, insects, parasites, and weeds) used to search the number of publications in PubMed).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Overall positive and negative effects of climate change and global warming on crops and humans.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Hormonal crosstalk related to different stresses.
Figure 6
Figure 6
A step-wise presentation of physiological, molecular breeding and genomics approaches to develop biotic and abiotic stress tolerance cultivars.
Figure 7
Figure 7
A model of CRISPR/Cas9 based genome engineering to develop transgenic plants or abiotic stress tolerance cultivars.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Arunanondchai P., Fei C., Fisher A., McCarl B.A., Wang W., Yang Y. The Routledge Handbook of Agricultural Economics. Routledge; Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: 2018. How does climate change affect agriculture.
    1. Noya I., González-García S., Bacenetti J., Fiala M., Moreira M.T. Environmental impacts of the cultivation-phase associated with agricultural crops for feed production. J. Clean. Prod. 2018;172:3721–3733. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.07.132. - DOI
    1. Vaughan M.M., Block A., Christensen S.A., Allen L.H., Schmelz E.A. The effects of climate change associated abiotic stresses on maize phytochemical defenses. Phytochem. Rev. 2018;17:37–49. doi: 10.1007/s11101-017-9508-2. - DOI
    1. FAO. UNICEF. WFP. WHO . The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017: Building Resilience for Peace and Food Security. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); Rome, Italy: 2018.
    1. Rosenzweig C., Elliott J., Deryng D., Ruane A.C., Müller C., Arneth A., Boote K.J., Folberth C., Glotter M., Khabarov N. Assessing agricultural risks of climate change in the 21st century in a global gridded crop model intercomparison. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2014;111:3268–3273. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1222463110. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources