Abiotic stresses drought, heat, salinity, and extreme temperatures are primary constraints on staple-crop productivity under climate change. Conventional breeding and genetic modification have delivered important gains, but their pace and scope may not match accelerating climatic pressures. Epigenome engineering, which manipulates heritable and reversible chromatin states (DNA methylation, histone marks, and small-RNA pathways) at specific loci without changing underlying DNA sequence, offers a complementary route for improving stress tolerance and stress memory in crops. Targeted epigenetic tools (e.g., dCas9 fused to DNA-methyltransferases/ demethylases, histone acetyltransferases/ deacetylases, or transcriptional activators/repressors) permit locus-specific activation or repression of stress-responsive networks, and have already produced stress-resilience phenotypes in model plants and early crop studies. Epigenomic approaches can modulate hormone signaling, osmoprotectant pathways, and antioxidant systems, and in some cases generate mitotically and potentially meiotically heritable effects that constitute a form of rapid adaptation (epigenetic memory). Key challenges for translation include ensuring specificity and stability of edits, understanding transgenerational inheritance, regulatory acceptance, and delivery in diverse staple species. Realizing the potential of epigenome engineering will require integration of high-resolution epigenomic mapping, robust editing platforms, field validation, and breeding pipelines that combine epigenetic variants with conventional genetic improvements.