Rice production under climate change : adaptations and mitigating strategies

In the current scenario of global climate change, the utmost desire to ensure food security is to maintain and increase agricultural production. But, due to rapid climate change, many abiotic factors such as rainfall, drought, flooding, temperature and solar radiations are severely affecting the production of rice at various growth stages. It is predicted that almost 51% of rice cultivation and production would be reduced during the next century due to global climate change. However, agriculture activities are also contributing to global warming by 10-14% of total global greenhouse gas emissions and 18% of the total methane is emitted from paddy rice fields. Therefore, mitigating and adaptation strategies such as alternate wetting and drying, inter cropping with short term vegetation, limiting chemical fertilizers by precise farming, usage of rice cultivars with low methane emission, improved tillage, recycling of farm waste into organic fertilizers, and by developing integrated rice farming system, are needed to hinder greenhouse gas emissions from rice fields. Furthermore, strategies are required to cope with effects of climate change on rice production by application of anaerobic methanotrops to oxidize the CH4, and the development of high-yielding and abiotic stresses-tolerant (temperature, drought) and resistance rice cultivars by using different new breeding, genetic engineering and genomic tools. Besides that, other management options such as development of weather-proofed farm equipment, shifting of planting and adjustments in cropping dates and use of climate forecasting by using remote sensing and modeling can also be used to sought out the climatic issues.