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Sunflower is considered more tolerant and adaptable to abiotic stresses than many other crops. It can be successfully grown in marginal soils and in semiarid conditions. Hence, sunflower crop stands a very good chance of surviving a changing environment with its broad genetic base and the use of emerging—omics technologies. In the future, it will be necessary to improve sunflower crop productivity under different abiotic stresses occurring individually or simultaneously Future work in sunflower genetics and breeding for abiotic stress tolerance should be directed to the research and exploitation of the available genetic resources, as useful sources of genes for resilience. An integrated multidisciplinary approach based on genetics and—omics, physiology, and modelling, along with the application of modern breeding tools, should be used for designing of novel sunflower varieties, more resilient for abiotic stresses and extreme environmental conditions that are becoming more frequent due to climate change. In this chapter, we present a review on how sunflower could be adapted to abiotic stresses, respective traits, genetic resources, and tools for their introduction into the cultivated sunflower, thus making sunflower tolerant to the extreme climatic conditions.

Due to its ability to grow in different agroecological conditions and its moderate drought tolerance, sunflower may become the oil crop of preference in the future, especially in the light of global environmental changes. In the field conditions, sunflower crop is often simultaneously challenged by different biotic and abiotic stresses, and understanding the shared mechanisms contributing to two or more stresses occurring individually or simultaneously is important to improve crop productivity under foreseeable complex stress situations. Exploitation of the available plant genetic resources in combination with the use of modern molecular tools for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and application of genomic selection (GS) could lead to considerable improvements in sunflower, especially with regard to different stresses and better adaptation to the climate change. In this chapter we present a review of climate-smart (CS) traits and respective genetic resources and tools for their introduction into the cultivated sunflower, thus making it the oil crop resilient to the extreme climatic conditions and well-known and emerging pests and diseases. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.