Breeding Crops for Climate Resilience: Integrating Conventional and Genomic Approaches

Abstract

Climate change, primarily caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations, is causing long-term changes in temperature, precipitation patterns, and extreme weather frequency, with far-reaching implications for agriculture and food security. Recent studies indicate that global staple crop yields have already declined by approximately 1.5% per decade due to climate-related stresses, highlighting the urgency for climate-resilient agricultural systems. Breeding programs must create climate-resilient cultivars in rapidly changing environments, while heat, drought, salinity, and increasing biotic stresses such as pests and diseases pose an increasing threat to crop productivity. Long growth cycles, little genetic diversity, and intricate genotype–environment interactions limit conventional plant breeding, despite its foundational nature. While current techniques like genomics-assisted selection, marker-assisted breeding, speed breeding, and genome editing are accelerating genetic advances, crop wild relatives and pre-breeding remain important sources of novel stress-tolerance genes. By combining these strategies, yield stability under climatic variability is supported and targeted improvements in biotic and abiotic stress tolerance are made possible. Future research must focus on breeding crops with tolerance to multiple simultaneous stresses, supported by high-throughput phenotyping platforms, artificial intelligence, and data-driven breeding approaches to enhance selection efficiency. In addition, strengthening global collaboration, conserving plant genetic resources, and promoting sustainable breeding strategies will be critical for ensuring long-term food security and climate-resilient agricultural systems. The most recent developments in climate-resilient crop breeding techniques are discussed in this review, which also emphasises integrated approaches for sustainable agricultural climate change adaptation.