**9. Future prospects**

In the face of ongoing and projected climate change, including higher temperatures and more erratic climate events across extensive regions over the globe, breeding of crop plants with enhanced yield potential and improved resilience to such environments is crucial for global food security. Improved plant varieties that can withstand diseases and pests with efficient use of fewer resources, exhibiting stable yields amidst stressful climate in near future could only help to achieve the goal of climate resilient agriculture. In order to be able to make contribution in climatic resilience, research attention is indispensable for currently underutilized crop species. The concept of smart breeding largely depends upon generating large breeding populations, efficient high throughput phenotyping, big data management tools and downstream molecular techniques to tackle the vulnerability of crop plants to changing climate (**Figure 3**). The efficient preservation and conservation of plant genetic resources is also a pre requisite for climate smart breeding. Strategies for capturing the novel variation may include the state of the art tools such as gene editing to directly introduce novel alleles found in wild plants into domesticated crop varieties. Generating new crop cultivars with the capability to tolerate multiple stresses can be achieved with increasing information on their basal physiological and genetic mechanisms. The technological improvements in phenotypic and genotypic analysis, as well as the biotechnological and digital revolution could definitely pave the way for developing and deployment of climate smart varieties in coming times.

*Smart Breeding for Climate Resilient Agriculture DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94847*

#### **Figure 3.**

*Compilation of state-of-the-art genomic, phenomic and computational tools comprising smart breeding approach for climatic resilience in agriculture.*
