Physics

Agricultural productivity

Climate change

Psychological resilience

Crop

Sociology

Pedagogy

Resilience (materials science)

Population

Psychotherapist

Agronomy

Biology

Green Revolution

Agriculture

Crop yield

Machine learning

Demography

Leverage (statistics)

Psychology

Economics

Natural resource economics

Ecology

Climate resilience

Computer science

Crop production

Environmental science

Agroforestry

World population

Transformative learning

Thermodynamics

Nature

The current trajectory for crop yields is insufficient to nourish the world’s population by 20501. Greater and more consistent crop production must be achieved against a backdrop of climatic stress that limits yields, owing to shifts in pests and pathogens, precipitation, heat-waves and other weather extremes. Here we consider the potential of plant sciences to address post-Green Revolution challenges in agriculture and explore emerging strategies for enhancing sustainable crop production and resilience in a changing climate. Accelerated crop improvement must leverage naturally evolved traits and transformative engineering driven by mechanistic understanding, to yield the resilient production systems that are needed to ensure future harvests. Genetic strategies for improving the yield and sustainability of agricultural crops, and the resilience of crops in the face of biotic and abiotic stresses contingent on projected climate change, are evaluated.

Genetic strategies for improving crop yields