4. Impact of Climate Change and Adaptation Strategies for Fruit Crops

The long life cycles of fruit crops causes these crops to be more challenged under stress as compared to crops of shorter duration that have more adaptation potential toward ending the crop cycle as quickly as possible. The inherent potential of these plants, aside from environmental challenges, maintains a viable production chain involving various strategies for plant management, including plant breeding activities exploiting variations. Genetic control of various traits to keep crops thriving in adverse situations allows better plant variety selections. Exploitation of available natural spontaneous and induced variations and selection based on easy phenotyping protocols provide short-duration annual crop species such as climate-responsive fruit crop varieties. Because both biotic and abiotic stresses are becoming unpredictably more frequent, interventions using recently developed biotechnological information, such as genomic data, can be a boon for climate-smart fruit crop development.