This book provides a view of the issues that agriculture will face in the future as a result of climate change. It comprises 10 chapters arranged in four parts. The first part looks to the past and reviews the importance of global climate change, particularly the global warming that followed the end of the last ice age, in triggering the development of agriculture.

The second part considers present and future challenges of climate change in four different agricultural systems, selected on the basis of the significance of their production for global food supply and likely magnitude of the effect of climate change. Systems selected are the dryland systems of the Mediterranean, irrigated rice in southern Asia, Pampean agriculture and horticulture.

This is followed by a section that seeks to present measures for coping with climate change. Extensive reviews are given on the impact of high CO₂ on abiotic stress tolerance, breeding to improve grain yield in water-limited environments, the use of molecular breeding and crop management on a system's perspective aided by information technologies.

The final chapter outlines how efforts to cope with climate change can be coordinated in the future by considering the roles of different forums in agricultural research and topics to be addressed.

Many chapters give excellent reviews of the literature pertaining to the subjects covered. However, a criticism of the book as a whole is that there is a lack of synthesis between different chapters, and little effort to draw together the information to provide a final conclusion. It is nevertheless a very useful publication for its target audience: researchers in agronomy, plant and environmental sciences.