Opportunities and avenues for achieving crop climate resilience

Global crop production and food-and-nutrition security are severely threatened by climate change-induced effects, including compound environmental stresses and dwindling crop genetic diversity. Developing climate-resilient crops, despite saddled with its own challenges, is touted as the most effective and sustainable way to adapt agriculture to climate change and guarantee future food-and-nutrition security. In this review-cum-perspective, we highlight key bottlenecks to engineering crop climate resilience before synthesizing existing opportunities for attaining the same. We advance that achieving crop climate resilience hinges on our capacity to (i) uncover the fundamental underpinnings of plant responses to compound stresses, (ii) harness the wild-side of crop species, (iii) innovate with novel breeding methods, (iv) couple the latest genomics and biotechnological advances, (v) modify current agronomic practices, and (vi) foster multi-disciplinary collaborations. Priority targets/avenues for research include improving crop photosynthesis capacity, enhancing aquaporin activity and water-use efficiency, root system architecture adjustment, plant-associated microbiomes exploration, and metabolic pathway engineering. •Climate change seriously hamper crop growth and productivity.•Developing climate-resilient crops could effectively and sustainably help us adapt agriculture to climate change and guarantee food security.•Despite challenges, opportunities for designing climate-resilient crops do exist.•Functional genomics advances coupled to new plant breeding and genome-editing innovations anchor our pursuit for climate-resilient crops.•Priority research avenues include photosynthesis efficiency improvement, metagenomics and root functional traits exploration.