Combating Climate Change: Call of the Century (C5)

International Climate Resilient Crop Genomics Consortium (www.ICRCGC.org) was founded in 2011 to formulate the concepts, strategies, tools and techniques to develop climate-smart crop varieties. Its missions includes utilization of the available genomic resources, particularly in the wild crop relatives, and the advanced tools of genomics, specifically next-generation sequencing. ICRCGC organized seven wroksops during the PAG conference in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015; one woekshop in collaboration with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation during the PAG conference in 2012, and one conference in collaboration with International Society of Crop Science held at Brazil in 2012. During these nine workshops, the deliberations were focused on the basic, 'translational' and participatory research and well as deliberations on future priorities. Meantime, a team of ICRCGC members has published a review entiled 'Application of genomics-assisted breeding for generation of climate resilient crops: progress and prospects' (Front. Plant Sci. 6:563. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2015.00563) as an outcome of the white paper drafted by the ICRCGC members (http://www.icrcgc.org/white_paper.html). In paralell, a number of other platforms with crop or geographic focus have been constituted with similar goals as the ICRCGC. Improved synergy, efficiency and outcomes seems likely if the work of these separate groups can be coordinated. The three workshops of Climate Change and ICRCGC I, II and III during PAG 2016 will aim at forging and fostering collaboration of the crop-wise, trait-wise and region-wise collaboration and interaction among academia, funding agencies and policy makers to architect the C⁵ platform.