Enhancing Horticultural Crop Resilience: Integrating Physiology, Breeding and Management under Climate Change

Abstract

Horticultural crops—encompassing vegetables, fruits, ornamentals, and condiment species—constitute an indispensable pillar of global food security, human nutrition, and smallholder livelihoods worldwide. Yet these crops remain acutely vulnerable to the multifarious stressors engendered by contemporary climate change, including progressively higher ambient temperatures, increasingly erratic precipitation regimes, elevated atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, and a rising frequency of extreme meteorological events. This review synthesises the current scientific understanding of how these climatic drivers impair fundamental physiological processes in horticultural crops, with particular attention to heat stress, drought, combined abiotic stress interactions, and the modulating influence of elevated CO₂. A systematic approach was adopted to identify, screen, and select literature for this review. Primary searches were conducted in Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and PubMed. The primary date range for literature retrieval was January 2000 to March 2026, although seminal foundational papers published prior to 2000 were also included where they provide indispensable conceptual grounding. The review further evaluates the spectrum of breeding strategies—ranging from classical phenotypic selection and marker-assisted breeding to genomic selection and precision genome editing—that have been deployed or show considerable promise for engineering durable climate resilience in horticultural species. In parallel, agronomic and management interventions, encompassing deficit irrigation, soil health stewardship, protected cultivation systems, and crop diversification, are assessed within the broader framework of sustainable intensification. The article advances the central argument that lasting solutions to climate-induced vulnerability in horticulture can only emerge from the deliberate, systems-level integration of physiological knowledge, genetic improvement programmes, and context-sensitive agronomic management. Such integrated frameworks, supported by digital agriculture platforms, precision sensing technologies, and sustained cross-disciplinary collaboration, are essential for securing the productivity, quality, and nutritional integrity of horticultural value chains in a rapidly warming world.