International Journal of Environment and Climate Change

Millets are frequently described as climate-resilient cereals because several species maintain production under heat, intermittent drought and low-input conditions that constrain major cereals. That description is directionally correct but agronomically incomplete: resilience is strongly conditioned by soil fertility, rooting environment, rainfall timing, crop establishment, genotype, weed pressure and the way water and nutrients are co-managed. This critical narrative review evaluates soil and crop management strategies for sustaining and increasing millet production under changing climate conditions, with emphasis on pearl millet, finger millet and representative small millets in rainfed and semi-arid systems. Literature published from 2000 to 5 August 2026 was identified through AGRIS, PubMed, OpenAlex, OpenAIRE, DOAJ, Semantic Scholar and Google Scholar, supplemented by citation searching and authoritative institutional sources. Evidence was appraised for design quality, duration, environmental representativeness, resource-use measurements and transferability. Across the literature, the most defensible conclusion is that no single practice provides climate resilience across environments. Integrated nutrient management, site-specific fertiliser targeting, strategic microdosing, residue retention, moisture conservation, timely sowing, stress-adapted cultivars and diversified millet-legume systems can improve yield or resource-use efficiency, but benefits are highly contingent on soil constraints and rainfall pattern. Nutrient microdosing is effective in low-input Sahelian systems yet may create nutrient-balance risks when not paired with organic matter and wider nutrient replenishment. Sensor-guided or soil-test-based fertilisation is promising, although evidence remains geographically concentrated. Water management is most effective when aligned with reproductive-stage sensitivity and soil water storage rather than treated as an irrigation-only intervention. Intercropping can improve land productivity but does not uniformly buffer severe drought. Future progress requires multi-year, multi-location experiments that test management bundles, quantify yield stability and soil change, include economic and labour outcomes, and explicitly evaluate genotype-by-management-by-climate interactions. Climate-resilient millet production should therefore be framed as adaptive soil-crop system management rather than as an inherent crop property.