Climate Change Impacts on Legume Crop Production and Adaptation Strategies

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Global Agricultural Production: Resilience to Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is a major constraint limiting legume production across the globe. Legume crops are a good source of food, feed and fodder, and they are grown on large scale in the arid and semi-arid tropics. Grain legumes provide great services to the ecosystem by fixing atmospheric nitrogen (N) through bacteria in root nodules, a process called biological N fixation (N-fixing symbiosis). Hence, legume can help to minimize emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), e.g. N2O, CO2 and CH4, reduce fossil fuel energy and boost C sequestration in the soil. Climate models have predicted more occurrence of climate extreme events in the future. These events will impede the legume production by disturbing the growth and development of crop. Hence, in this chapter, we discussed the impact of heat stress, elevated CO2 concentration eCO2, drought and rainfall variability on legume crop production so that adaptation options can be suggested for the sustainable crop production. Results showed that legumes having C3 fixation pathway have shown higher rate of photosynthesis, reduction in photorespiration, more biomass production and higher water use efficiency under eCO2. However, with the rise in temperature, plants show faster development rate, shorter life cycle, shorter grain filling duration and lower yield. Similarly, the positive impact of eCO2 on nodulation was hampered by rise in temperature. In general, legume could cope eCO2 even up to 1000 ppm by carbohydrate allocation in the form of sucrose and its storage as starch. Moreover, apart from starch mobilization, protein synthesis in legumes helps them to adapt in the changing climate. Water stress is another climate extreme event that limits the legume crop production at all phenological stages, but its impact is more severe during flowering and grain development phases, called terminal drought. Hence, adaptation options such as development of new climate-resilient legume crop cultivars, ideotype designing through use of process-based crop models, change in sowing dates, availability of short duration cultivars, use of precision agriculture tools for accurate application of irrigation and fertilization, intercrop**, switching to better adapted legume cultivars and crop diversification are needed to combat the negative impact of climate extreme.

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Correspondence to Mukhtar Ahmed .

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Ahmed, M., Sameen, A., Parveen, H., Ullah, M.I., Fahad, S., Hayat, R. (2022). Climate Change Impacts on Legume Crop Production and Adaptation Strategies. In: Ahmed, M. (eds) Global Agricultural Production: Resilience to Climate Change . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14973-3_5

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