ABSTRACT
The global agricultural community has now acknowledged that climate change is a fact and is here to stay. Climate change could become the biggest driver of biodiversity loss and thus poses a new challenge in the conservation and management of plant genetic resources. The average global surface temperature has increased by 0.2°C per decade in the past 40 years and is further predicted to increase by 6°C by 2050 (Rana and Sharma 2009). The time has come when the vast quantities of genetic resources conserved in genebanks around the world need to be evaluated specifically to address the need for genes to combat or mitigate the effects of climate change. Some of the collections may not have adequate representation of the global resource for these genes, and those gaps will have to be filled by additional collections to cover the full geographic distribution of a crop species, especially from areas that are at the ecogeographic extremes of the distribution, where novel genes for tolerance to abiotic stresses may exist. As wild progenitors are the ones most exposed to climate 60change, consolidation of those collections from various genebanks for evaluation of adaptation to climate change should be given high priority.
