Climatic Impacts and Sustainable Horticultural Production

The climatic requirement of different crops and even their peak yield area are different. Still the experiments and cultivation is going on the off season crops as well as off area cropping. Climate change and climate variability are the concern of human kind in recent decades all over the world. The recurrent drought and desertification seriously threaten the livelihood of over 1.2 billion people who depend on the land for most of their needs. The weather related disasters viz. drought and floods, ice storms, dust storms, hail storms, land slides, thunder clouds associated with lightening and forest fires are not uncommon over one or other region of the world. The important thing is to think that to find the overcome solutions to increase or to sustain the crop productivity. Sudden change in temperature, heavy rainfall, drought condition, air pollution, water pollution and soil pollution are the threats to global agriculture. Besides this the new transgenic varieties of crops and their environmental hazards on climate is soon-coming evil. Though these are threats for global agriculture but in other side these are challenges to us for maintaining the sustainability in our global agricultural production. Increase in prize level of agricultural inputs and risk of crop loss may the forthcoming headache to growers of the world. The research workers and policy makers now need to pay more attention to feed the nutritious food continuously for the upcoming generation. The geographical distribution of pests is mainly based on climatic factors. The climatic conditions show a gradient from place to place and there is a related gradient in the abundance of a particular pest/disease. The periodic or seasonal nature of incidence and outbreaks of several pests and diseases of many crops can be ascribed to weather conditions as the triggering factors. Increase in aerosols (atmospheric pollutants) due to emission of green house gases including black carbon and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), ozone depletion, UV-B filtered radiation, cold and heat waves, global cooling and warming and “human hand” in the form of deforestation and loss of wetlands in the process of imbalanced development for betterment of human kind may be causal factors for climate variability and climate change.