Climate Change and ICRCGC

Climate change is expected to cause drastic changes in agroclimatic conditions including temperature, precipitation, soil nutrients, and incidence of disease-pests. To combat these changed scenarios, development of climate-resilient crop varieties with growth plasticity, resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, improved growth and development patterns, higher efficiency for carbon sequestration and utilization of soil macro- and micronutrients is imperative. Serious efforts should be made to identify and generate suitable genetic resources and develop proper climate envelop for their conservation. Genomic and transgenic techniques coupled with traditional breeding approaches must be deployed for genomic dissection of crops’ responses to climate change and their improvement with new gene combinations for a more sustainable agriculture. Speakers with life-time experiences on diverse crops will address these issues and will depict the road map of future genomics and molecular breeding endeavors including constitution of the International Climate-Resilient Crop Genomics Consortium (ICRCGC).