Climate Change and Indian Agriculture: Challenges and Adaptation Strategies

Abstract

Natural and human activities have increased the greenhouse emissions and st it will continue to boost global temperature in the 21 century. In this paper, we discuss the profound impact of climate on plant diseases — if the climatic conditions are not favourable to disease, a vulnerable host will not be infected by a virulent pathogen. Variable concentrations of CO , temperature, and availability 2 of water may induce positive, neutral, or negative effects on disease development. Nevertheless, the basic concept of interactions of host-pathogen-environment may theoretically be applied to all pathosystems. Environmental factors also inuence different pathways of plant resistance viz., pathogen pattern-triggered immunity, effector-triggered immunity, RNA interference, and other networks of defence-related hormones. On the pathogen hand, temperature and humidity affect the processes of virulence, such as the development of toxins and virulence proteins, as well as reproduction and survival of pathogenic substances. Most of the laboratory works so far conducted on molecular-level plant-pathogen interactions focused on a few well-established pathosystems and static environmental conditions that represent just a fraction of the whole gamut of complex plant-pathogen-environmental interactions that occur in nature. To address the impacts of climate change on host plant resistance, the future work is urgently required to understand the complex plant-pathogen interactions under variable environmental conditions to understand the multidimensional nature of the interactions and develop climate-ready disease-resistant crop plants.