**6. Impacts of climate change on crop production**

Due to climatic changes overall crop production system has affected, ultimately causing a challenge to global food security. But the more severe impact of these changes has been observed in underdeveloped countries. Over the next decade it is predicted that billions of people, particularly from underdeveloped countries may encountered with water as well as food scarcity, accompanied with a high risk to the life and health due to climate changes. Developing countries are more prone to the changing climatic conditions as these countries lack in social, financial as well as technological resources, which required facing the climate change [17].

Environmental conditions always cast an impact on either the succession or failure of crops, while the management of stresses caused due to these changes has been part of multidisciplinary studies. Global crop production system has shown continuous susceptibility to the risks of changing climatic conditions. Now farmers have been facing severe challenges than the normally experienced, due to changing climatic conditions. Global climatic conditions became extreme like, warmer temperatures, increased coastal waters, heavy precipitation, and geographical shifts in drought as well as storm patterns [18].

It is estimated that climatic changes may cause a considerable decrease in maize production in southern Africa. It may also cause up to 10% decrease in staple crops of south Asia, including rice while more than 10% decrease in millet and maize production [19]. With a slight increase of 1-3°C in the mean local temperature of some moderate- to high latitude areas, productivity may also be increased, depending on

#### **Figure 3.**

*Food chain from pre-production to consumption.*


#### **Table 1.**

*Impacts of climate change on crop production [22].*

the crop. In contrasting, in areas of lower latitudes productivity of crop decreased with the even slightest change in relative temperature range [20].

Unpredictable seasonal as well annual, fluctuations have been observed in crop production system due to the abrupt outbreaks of disease and pest and other extreme events. This require an efficient adaptable management response towards these changing scenarios [21].

Agriculture crop production is facing a number of impacts due to climate change in the components of weather/climate such as temperature, precipitation, cyclones, sea level etc. (**Table 1**).

#### **7. Modern tools of climate smart crop production**

Climate change, which includes high temperatures and drought, is projected to have a detrimental effect on plant agronomic conditions as well as soil nutrients, diseases, and pests. As a result, climate-resilient varieties with broad spectrum and long-term tolerance to both biotic and abiotic stresses are required. The new genetic engineering method for crop enhancement is precise genome editing [23]. Climate change has put a pressure on researcher, farmers and scientists working in the field of agriculture to adopt new technologies to cope with the prevailing issues (**Figure 4**). For targeted genome editing in plants, several techniques have been developed, including zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), TAL effector proteins (TALENs), RNA directed nucleases (RGENs), and CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9. Both of these approaches depend on the creation of double stranded breaks at particular loci and the activation of the DNA repair system [24].

#### **7.1 Genome editing**

Crops with higher yields and greater resistance to abiotic stress are needed to meet the demands of a growing global population and the effect of climate change on agriculture. Traditional crop improvement through genetic recombination or random mutagenesis, on the other hand, is a time-consuming process that cannot keep up with rising crop demand. Genome editing techniques including clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR/Cas) allow for selective alteration of almost any crop genome

*Climate Smart Crops for Food Security DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99164*

**Figure 4.** *Impact of climate change on agriculture.*

sequence to generate novel variation and speed up breeding efforts. We anticipate a gradual transition away from conventional breeding and toward selective genome editing cycles in crop improvement. Crop enhancement by genome editing is not limited by existing variation or the need to pick alleles through several breeding generations. However, the lack of full reference genomes, a lack of awareness of possible modification goals, and the legal status of edited crops restrict current crop genome editing applications. We believe that overcoming the technological and social barriers to genome editing's implementation will allow this technology to produce a new generation of high-yielding, climate-ready crops [25]. At our lab, we are using different online platforms such as CHOPCHOP, CRISPR-P, MultiTargetor etc, and reagents provided by Addgene, Vectorbuilder, GeneCopoeia, Nootropics Frontline etc. for genome editing in crops.
