Global role of plant breeding in tackling climate change

Temesgen Begna*

Nowadays, several global major production constraints of crop plants are identified: climate change, rapid population growth, increasing demand for food, reduction biodiversity, increasing demand for agricultural inputs and other multiple factors simultaneously affect crop plant production and productivity. These all production impediments are resulted substantial yield reduction across the world. Currently, climate change is becoming a serious challenge across the world with significant threats of food security, ecosystems, economic stability, and water resources. Climate change is also impacting the world through hampering the productivity; particularly the tropical regions of the world are suffering from drought and heat to develop and produce the high yielding crops during the crop life cycle. Climate change is caused by different agents, mainly greenhouse gas emissions from natural systems and human activities and shift in climate patterns and composition. Climate change has a potential to adversely affect agricultural productivity to the irreversible level and drives to hunger of millions of the global community. However, plant breeding was playing key roles in tackling production hindrance of crop plants through developing high yielding and resistance crop varieties against the production constraints. Plant breeding is the science improvement of crop plants for quantitative and qualitative traits and developing improved resistance crop technologies against biotic and abiotic stresses. These days, climate adaptation and mitigation strategies are developed and used to overcome the drastic effect of climate change on food security and livelihoods of the world communities. Climate adaptation and mitigation are the most important and an interdependent strategy that uses for complement one another in tackling the impact of climate change and pave the way for sustainable survival of earth’s inhabitants. Climate adaptation has direct relation with the reduction of the negative impact of climate change through developing resilient crop plants to climate change whereas mitigation is devise to overcome causes and reduction of the possible impacts of climate change. Climate change affects food security in various ways, especially through impacting on all four components of food security (availability, accessibility, affordability, utilization and nutritional value and food system stability), through impacting on crop production and yield, through impacting on water availability, through impacting on fisheries production, through impacting on agricultural pests and through impacting on livestock production. Generally, plant breeding has profound impact on food production and will continue to play a vital role in the food security. Plant breeding is primarily relied on presence of substantial genetic variations to address the maximum genetic yield potential of the crops and exploitation of these variations through effective selection for improvement. 

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Published on: Jul 16, 2021 Pages: 223-229

Full Text PDF Full Text HTML DOI: 10.17352/2455-815X.000111
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