Biofortification Under Climate Change: The Fight Between Quality and Quantity

Abstract

Climate change has been a serious problem in our industrialized world for the last century. We have faced its devastating effects on the environment, agriculture and human population. In current scenarios, around 3.8 billion people are predicted to live in areas with severe water problems by 2025. As the majority of staple crops are sensitive to environmental fluctuations, only an increase in global temperatures by 2 °C can disrupt agricultural practices and crop production periods severely. Therefore, plant breeders have canalized all the efforts to enhance the grain yield and produce more crops under adverse environmental conditions to meet the demand of the ever-increasing human population. However, the majority of current staple crop varieties produce grains with insufficient micronutrients. Moreover, climate change decreases micronutrient uptake from the soil and translocation within the plant body. In this chapter, three strategies (agronomic, breeding and transgenics) of micronutrient biofortification in various staple crops are explained with recent successful examples. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020