Agricultural Horizons: Research, Technology and Sustainable Development Vol. 3

Heat stress, drought and water scarcity increasingly constrain crop production, but they are often treated as separate problems even though they interact through plant physiology, soil water balance, atmospheric demand and water-allocation decisions. This critical narrative review evaluates how crop production can be made more resilient by integrating stress physiology, irrigation management, soil and crop husbandry, genetic improvement, sensing and decision support, and water governance. Literature was selected from multidisciplinary agricultural and environmental scholarly sources, prioritising peer-reviewed field studies, meta-analyses, influential mechanistic research and recent reviews. The evidence indicates that combined heat and drought frequently impose greater reproductive and yield penalties than either stress alone, while the capacity of irrigation to buffer heat is increasingly limited where water supplies are depleted or contested. Deficit irrigation, partial root-zone approaches, mulching, altered sowing windows, crop diversification and improved soil water storage can raise water productivity or reduce exposure to stress, but their benefits are strongly dependent on crop, phenological stage, soil, climate and water-accounting scale. Breeding and crop improvement are most defensible when traits are selected for defined target environments and compound stresses rather than for generic drought or heat tolerance. Precision sensing and climate-informed irrigation can improve timing, yet technological efficiency does not automatically translate into basin-scale water savings because rebound effects and expanded irrigated area can offset field-level gains. The strongest adaptation strategy is therefore not a single technology but a portfolio that couples stress-avoidance, tolerance, water conservation and allocation safeguards. Important research priorities include multi-location experiments under realistic compound stress, whole-system water accounting, genotype-by-management optimisation, long-term soil-water studies, and decision systems that explicitly incorporate uncertainty, equity and hydrological limits. Climate-resilient crop production will depend on aligning plant-level resilience with farm profitability and catchment-scale water sustainability.