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Humanity is facing three interlinked global challenges: ensuring food and nutritional security for a growing population, reducing the environmental footprint of agricultural production, and strengthening resilience to climate change. Within this context, legumes have emerged as strategic crops for a sustainable and climate-resilient future. They provide high-quality plant-based proteins, essential micronutrients, and bioactive compounds that support human and animal nutrition, while also delivering key ecosystem services.

Through biological nitrogen fixation, legumes enrich soil fertility, reduce dependency on synthetic fertilizers, enhance soil carbon sequestration, and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Their inclusion in crop rotations and intercropping systems also enhances biodiversity, improves soil structure, and boosts agroecosystem sustainability. These multiple functions position legumes at the core of global strategies aimed at climate-smart agriculture, sustainable intensification, and dietary transitions toward plant-based food systems.

Previous volumes of Legumes for Global Food Security (Frontiers in Plant Science, 2020, 2022 and 2023) established the scientific foundation for understanding the biological and agronomic potential of legumes. However, accelerating climate change introduces new complexities. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, heat and drought episodes, elevated CO₂ levels, and shifting pest and disease pressure all threaten yield stability, seed quality, and nitrogen fixation efficiency. Recent modelling studies estimate potential yield losses between 10% and 50% by mid-century if adaptive measures are not implemented. Therefore, a deeper, integrated research effort is required to elucidate how legumes respond, adapt, and contribute to climate mitigation and food system resilience.

This third volume focuses on the role of legumes under climate change, addressing their contribution to food security from multiple, interconnected perspectives: physiological, molecular, agronomic, nutritional, plus socio-economic. The Topic encourages submissions that explore the mechanisms, technologies, and systems approaches enabling legumes to thrive in variable and extreme environments while sustaining productivity and quality.

Relevant themes include, but are not limited to:

• Climate stress adaptation – Effects of combined and sequential stresses (heat, drought, salinity, flooding, elevated CO₂) on plant growth, reproduction, yield stability, nitrogen fixation, and seed composition.

• Molecular and genetic resilience – Multi-omics integration (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, phenomics) to identify adaptive traits, stress-tolerance pathways, and beneficial symbioses with rhizobia and mycorrhizae.

• Breeding and biotechnology – Marker-assisted and genomic selection, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), gene editing, and advanced breeding pipelines for climate-smart legume varieties.

• Agroecology and ecosystem services – Role of legumes in regenerative and low-input farming, soil carbon accumulation, microbial biodiversity, and reduction of nitrogen fertilizer use and emissions.

• Nutritional and nutraceutical dimensions – Impacts of climate variables on seed composition, amino acid balance, anti-nutritional factors, and bioactive compounds; strategies for biofortification, post-harvest optimization, and health-promoting properties.

• Socio-economic and policy aspects – Scaling adoption of legumes in global food systems, market integration, value chains, and policy frameworks for sustainable production.

This Research Topic aims to assemble cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that advances our understanding of how legumes can contribute to sustainable, climate-resilient, and nutrition-sensitive agri-food systems. By bridging plant physiology, genetics, and ecology with agronomy, food science, and sustainability assessment, this collection will highlight both mechanistic discoveries and field-level solutions.

We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, and Perspectives addressing the diverse roles of legumes under climate change—from molecular mechanisms to system-scale applications. Studies linking omics approaches to phenotypic or agronomic outcomes, as well as modelling, breeding, and socio-economic analyses, are particularly encouraged.

By integrating scientific advances with actionable solutions, Legumes for Global Food Security - Volume III seeks to outline the next frontiers in legume research - strengthening their central role in low-emission, climate-smart agriculture and in ensuring food and nutrition security for a changing world.

Are you interested in contributing a manuscript to this Research Topic?

Legumes for Global Food Security, Volume III