Challenges of Plant Nutrition and Climate Change: Focus on Fruit Crops

Climate change is a global event, characterized by often uncertain crop responses, often affecting the production and nutritional quality of crops, including fruit. Plant nutrition in this context is seen as strong via-medium in imparting an additional biochemical preparedness in reverting any adverse effects of climate change, including the frequent events. High carbon locking (carbon sequestration within woody framework) ability of fruit crops provides an edge by creating a parallel nutrient sink (fertilization effect of elevated CO2) to magnify the impact of plant nutrition compared to any other horticultural crops. On the other hand, parameters such as salinity, drought, and high temperature are accompanied with increased accumulation of secondary metabolites and antioxidants (grapes and citrus) coupled with early maturity, thereby creating a niche for underutilized fruits to occupy a place of prominence. Unfortunately, most of the crop responses are not studied in response to the integrated effect of climate change and mark the absence of any yield predictive models (all C3 fruit crops are considered highly responsive to increased CO2 concentration). Introducing C4 photosynthetic cycle into fruit crops, upscaling 4R (coupled with 4W) principles in climate change scenario, plant nutrition in the interaction of nutrients at various levels, and the use of microbially modified crops associated with the use of potential stress mitigators such as silicon are some of the suggested scientific interventions.