Climate Change and Crop Production: Foundations for Agroecosystem Resilience

In the twenty-rst century, our planet is experiencing profound and serious climatic, environmental, and socio-economic upheavals. The consequences will affect ecosystems, biodiversity, and food security of many countries, particularly in the developing countries, and everyone’s way of life. Among these upheavals, climate change may be the most serious threat affecting agroecosystems and global food security. One large challenge facing humanity is to understand the extent to which climates will change and the effects on ecosystem, particularly agroecosystem, resilience. The role of scientists will be to inform the search for strategies on how to mitigate these effects and ensure sustainability of food production systems.
Because diverse impacts on agroecosystems are anticipated under a scenario of climate change, it is crucial to decipher how changing temperature and water availability will affect crop growth and productivity, and consequently the production of food. Also critical is the spatial distribution of change and how this will impact those with limited resources. Curbing, coping with, and mitigating change are all key factors that will shape the future severity of climate change impacts on agroecosystems and food production. To achieve these goals, radical and creative strategies such as permaculture, polycultures, agroforestry, crop-livestock mixed systems and crops diversication, soil management, water conservation and harvesting, and general enhancement of agrobiodiversity will likely strengthen resilience and sustainability of agroecosystems. Understanding features underlying agroecosystem resilience is the rst challenge. This can provide a foundation and support integrative responses for designing adapted agroecosystems, building resilience into food systems, and developing smarter agriculture and novel strategies for climate-resilient agroecosystems. In this book, the authors describe responses of crops to climate change and examples of…