Field Crop 2025, Vol.8, No.5, 213-221 http://cropscipublisher.com/index.php/fc 213 Research Insight Open Access Climate-Smart Cotton Farming: Adapting Field Practices to Drought and Heat Stress Jiayi Wu, Xiaojing Yang, Yuxin Zhu Modern Agriculture Research Center, Cuixi Academy of Biotechnology, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China Corresponding email: yuxin.zhu@cuixi.org Field Crop, 2025, Vol.8, No.5 doi: 10.5376/fc.2025.08.0021 Received: 03 Jul., 2025 Accepted: 11 Aug., 2025 Published: 05 Sep., 2025 Copyright © 2025 Wu et al., This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Wu J.Y., Yang X.J., and Zhu Y.X., 2025, Climate-smart cotton farming: adapting field practices to drought and heat stress, Field Crop, 8(5): 213-221 (doi: 10.5376/fc.2025.08.0021) Abstract With the increasingly severe global climate change, drought and high-temperature stress have become the main environmental factors restricting the improvement of cotton yield and quality. The traditional field management model has many limitations in responding to extreme climate events, making it particularly urgent to promote the application of climate-smart agriculture in cotton production. This study focuses on the physiological response mechanisms of cotton under drought and high-temperature stress conditions. It systematically sorts out the key technical paths such as current climate-intelligent farming measures, breeding of stress-resistant varieties, intelligent irrigation and monitoring. By analyzing the practical cases of typical cotton-growing areas at home and abroad in water-saving cultivation, sowing period adjustment, heat stress monitoring and precise irrigation, it explores their adaptability and promotion effects. It also looks forward to the future development direction of climate-intelligent cotton planting models based on multi-source data fusion and decision support systems. This study aims to provide theoretical basis and technical support for efficient and sustainable cotton production in the context of addressing climate change. Keywords Climate-smart agriculture; Cotton cultivation; Drought stress; High-temperature stress; Field management 1 Introduction Not all crops can be as vulnerable to climate change as cotton. Especially in those arid or semi-arid regions where water resources are already tight and temperatures are relatively high, once extreme weather becomes frequent, it is often these economic crops that rely on stable climate conditions that are the first to be "injured". Cotton is widely cultivated in over 30 countries around the world, making it a "sensitive indicator" under the fluctuations of climate variation. But the problems are not limited to temperature and rainfall. Soil degradation, the intensification of pests and diseases, and even the vulnerability of farmers themselves at the socio-economic level have all been superimposed on the risks of this industry. It is easy to imagine that relying solely on old methods will not be enough. The entire industry has begun to realize that "how to adapt to climate change" is no longer a problem to be considered in the future, but a reality that must be addressed at present (Khan et al., 2018; Rahman et al., 2020; Asma et al., 2025; Liu et al., 2025). Drought and high-temperature stress are the most critical abiotic factors restricting global cotton production. From seedling emergence, root development, photosynthesis all the way to bell formation, hardly any of these physiological processes can be completely avoided. If the plants develop slowly, the cotton bolls cannot be retained, and eventually the harvest will not increase. Some years even directly caused significant losses for farmers (Ul-Allah, 2020; Farooq et al., 2023). In the face of these challenges, so-called climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has begun to be mentioned by more people. The core of it is not mysterious. It is to combine water-saving practices, resilient varieties and flexible management to protect cotton fields with a stronger and more futures-adaptive system, and even reduce some greenhouse gas emissions incidentally (Imran et al., 2018). This study reviews the current and projected impacts of climate change on cotton production, with a focus on drought and high-temperature stresses. It explores the physiological, biochemical and agronomic responses of cotton to these stresses, and highlights the latest advancements in cotton stress resistance breeding and management. This study integrates the evidence of the effectiveness of climate-smart practices, identifies
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