Climate Change and Sustainable Agriculture: Water, Soil, Carbon, Crops and Livelihoods in Transition

Herbicide resistance has changed weed management from a problem that can often be solved by substituting one control product for another into a problem of managing adaptation within agroecosystems. This critical narrative review evaluates how agronomic systems can be redesigned to achieve durable weed control after resistance has emerged, while retaining herbicides as useful but non-exclusive tools. The literature was selected through searches of major agricultural and multidisciplinary scholarly sources, supplemented by citation searching and verification of bibliographic metadata and Digital Object Identifiers. Evidence was organised around evolutionary mechanisms, weed demography, cropping-system diversification, seedbank management, harvest weed seed control, herbicide stewardship, precision technologies, and implementation constraints. The synthesis indicates that durable control depends less on the number of tactics deployed than on whether those tactics impose functionally different filters across weed life stages and prevent survivors from replenishing the seedbank. Crop rotation, competitive crop design, cover crops, strategic tillage, mechanical control and harvest weed seed control can each contribute, but their effects are strongly conditioned by weed biology, crop sequence, climate, machinery, labour and timing. Herbicide mixtures and rotations can delay resistance under appropriate conditions, yet they cannot provide evolutionary immunity, particularly where non-target-site and cross-resistance mechanisms erode independence among herbicides. Precision mapping, targeted application and robotics may reduce treatment intensity and improve survivor management, but their durability depends on integration with demographic and ecological controls. A recurrent weakness in the literature is the dominance of short-term, tactic-level experiments relative to long-term systems studies that measure seedbank trajectories, resistance allele dynamics, yield, profitability and operational complexity together. The most defensible post-resistance strategy is therefore adaptive systems redesign: reduce repeated selection, diversify disturbance and resource environments, minimise seed return, detect failure early and revise the system before one tactic becomes indispensable.