Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) is one of the most important crops in the world today, accounting for about 80 percent of the world's sugar production and becoming a more and more important source of bioenergy. The sugar production in 2024-2025 is estimated at about 180.4 million metric tons, and is projected to grow to about 186 million metric tons during 2025-2026, despite the growing challenge of climatic variability in the production of sugar. The changes in climatic parameters such as increase in temperature, variation in rain, drought, salinity, and extreme climatic events are posing threats to the productivity of sugarcane and hence identification and deployment of climate resilient genotypes become an urgent issue. This thorough review brings together the latest information on the assessment of sugarcane genotypes for growth traits, yield components, quality traits and climate resilience mechanisms, based on production statistics, genomic resources and physiological trial data up to 2026. The critical growth parameters examined include germination percentage, tillering capacity, plant height, stem diameter, internode length and biomass accumulation. It also discusses the assessment of yield which includes the number of millable canes, single cane weight, cane yield per hectare, sugar yield and harvest index, and quality which includes Brix, Pol, purity, fiber content and Commercial Cane Sugar in relation to genotypic variation and environment interaction. Extensive review of the physiological and biochemical mechanisms that underpin climate resilience, such as osmotic adjustment, chlorophyll stability, antioxidant defense systems, water use efficiency, stomatal regulation, and molecular approaches, including SSR markers, SNPs, QTL mapping, genomic selection and CRISPR based gene editing, are detailed and discussed in the context of their potential role for facilitating the development of stress tolerant cultivars, with reference to the current state of reference genome assemblies for cultivars like R570 and SP80 3280. The applications of genotype evaluation methods such as genotype by environment interaction analysis, AMMI and GGE biplot in multi environment trials are described. There is significant genotypic variation found in the world for stress resistance and several cultivars have been identified with drought, heat, salinity and waterlogging tolerance. With over 1.38 billion hectares (10.7 % of the global land area) already affected by soil salinity, more than 10 % of the global irrigated and rainfed cropland is already impacted. The future research directions include the adoption of high throughput phenotyping and artificial intelligence for fast sugarcane breeding, remote sensing and genomics and phenomics for climate smart sugarcane breeding. This review offers a scientific basis for better understanding of the genetic rations available for breeding, agronomists and policy makers in their quest for sustainable sugarcane production in the face of a changing climate.
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