Abstract
Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an important cool season food legume cultivated in more than 55 countries across the globe. In the context of climate change, productivity of chickpea is hampered by higher incidence of abiotic and biotic stresses. Among abiotic stresses, drought, heat, cold and salinity are the most important yield limiting factors. Advanced genomics technologies have great potential to accelerate mapping, gene discovery, marker development and genomics-assisted breeding. Integration of precise phenotypic data along with sequence information will help in developing cultivars tolerant to various abiotic stresses. In this chapter, we discuss the impact of various abiotic stresses on chickpea production and provide an update on potential strategies to develop stress-tolerant chickpea cultivars. In addition, we also summarize the systematic efforts of simplifying the complex traits in chickpea as well as development of improved varieties with tolerance to abiotic stresses during last decade. In addition, we also highlight the emerging stresses and future strategies to combat the abiotic stresses.