**5. Drought stress**

Environmental stress reduces the crop productivity and plant growth and drought is the major abiotic stress, affecting crop productivity [41, 42]. Sugarcane

#### *Climate Change and Agriculture*

crop is highly sensitive to water deficit [43] and water deficit reduce the crop productivity up to 60% [44, 45]. Under water deficit conditions, sugarcane providing a key impetus to develop bio-technological strategies [43]. Under drought conditions, plant adopt various tolerant strategies such as modulation of growth, changes in life cycle, evolution of stress perception for rapid expression of stress tolerance and balance allocation of resources for stress adaptation and growth [25, 46, 47]. Molecular Breeding and biotechnology techniques are helpful tools to enhance crop productivity under water deficit conditions [25].
