Climate resilient technologies to meet the challenges in vegetable production

The changing patterns of climatic parameters like rise in atmospheric temperature, changes in precipitation patterns, excess UV radiation and higher incidence of extreme weather events like droughts and floods are emerging major threats for vegetable production in the tropical zone (Tirado et al., 2010). Vegetable crops are very sensitive to climatic vagaries and sudden rise in temperature as well as irregular precipitation at any phase of crop growth can affect the normal growth, flowering, pollination, fruit development and subsequently decrease the crop yield (Afroza et al., 2010). To mitigate the adverse impact of climatic change on productivity and quality of vegetable crops there is need to develop sound adaptation strategies. The emphasis should be on development of production systems for improved water use efficiency adoptable to the hot and dry condition. The crop management practices like mulching with crop residues and plastic mulches help in conserving soil moisture. Excessive soil moisture due to heavy rain becomes major problem which can be overcome by growing crops on raised beds (Singh et al., 2010). Development of genotypes tolerant to high temperature, moisture stress, salinity and climate proofing through conventional, non conventional, breeding techniques, genomics and biotechnology etc. are essentially required to meet these challenges.