New Plant Breeding Technologies for Climate-Smart Agriculture: Enhancing Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Global agriculture faces serious difficulties from climate change, which puts food security and agricultural yield at risk. Innovative approaches are required to generate robust crops due to temperature shifts, changing precipitation patterns, and an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. With cutting-edge plant breeding technologies (NPBTs), including CRISPR/Cas9, farmers may tweak crop genomes with previously unheard-of precision to increase resistance to abiotic stresses like drought, salinity, and high temperatures. By overcoming the time-consuming and genetic diversity-restricted nature of traditional breeding procedures, these technologies expedite the generation of climate-resilient cultivars. The agricultural enhancement process is further accelerated by speed breeding techniques, which allow for many generations in a year. The most recent developments in NPBTs and their uses in climate-smart agriculture to increase resistance to abiotic stresses are summarized in this chapter. Genome editing offers a holistic strategy to ensure agricultural sustainability when combined with climate-smart agricultural techniques, such as improving soil health and water use efficiency. The promise for NPBTs to lessen the effects of climate change and protect global food security lies in their ability to combine contemporary breeding methods with climate-resilient farming practices. A thorough bibliometric study of research trends from 2020 to 2024 highlights important areas of concentration, including food security, sustainable development, and crop stress tolerance. The results highlight how important genome editing technologies are to improving agricultural resilience to ongoing environmental problems.