Climate-Ready Genebanks for Climate-Smart Agriculture

Climate-smart agriculture demands development of new crop varieties involving the use of a wider range of intra-specific diversity so as to increase adaptability and resilience, and improve ecosystem services. Indian agriculture is well served by availability of disease- resistant or heat/drought tolerant. However, varietal development programmes, need to be constantly fed by genotypes with excellent adaptation potential. The best way to identify germplasm suitable for abiotic stress tolerance is to evaluate them based on specific traits. The challenge is to prepare the genebanks to be climate-ready in terms of availability of resilient germplasm accessions and planning and executing collection and conservation activities. Genebank housed at ICAR-NBPGR, needs to consider working on systematic identification of germplasm accessions that are multiple-stress tolerant using all possible methodologies including climate-analogue studies and field/lab evaluation.