Rice Climate Change

Dae Hyun Park

August 19, 2015

Issue: Climate Change and its Effect on Rice Production

Title: Anxiety Surrounding Rice: An Assessment on Climate Change and its Negative Impact on Rice

1st Draft

Abstract

With overwhelming scientific research conducted via both direct and indirect models of experimentation, we can conclude that climate change is a fundamental reason for the severe reduction in rice production. There are five main factors, discussed in this paper, that cause such reduction: temperature increase, drought, submergence, and rising sea levels. Such set back in rice yield needs to be viewed upon with great urgency due to the vital role rice occupies. Rice has the role of being the main food and economic resource for

A large part of the world, mainly Southeast Asia, is used for rice harvest, specifically, 154 million ha which produces over 14 tonnes/ha/year (FAOSTAT, 2012). Table 1 shows the total world area used for rice harvest. As mentioned repeatedly above, rice feeds billions of lives globally. To be specific, the people of Southeast Asia have been living off of rice for 4,000 years with 557 million people being dependent on rice as the staple food (Manzanilla et al., 2011). For supplementary information, Table 2 provides information regarding data that specifically lists countries reliant on rice and their dependency on rice for calories. For the very highly dependent category, 3.08 billion people were subjected as very highly dependent, followed by 3 billion people belonging to other categories of dependency (Table 2). In addition, rice serves as a key source of employment and many other diverse economic activities. To sum up, rice is a key asset to the human race due to its existence being one of the main crops in the world, being a vital factor for nutrition and being a main subject of economic

Table 3 (FAO 2005) presents data on temperatures for the rice plant at different growth stages. As shown, both high and low temperatures are critical on growth stages as they constrain efficient growth and production. As global warming is the present issue, high temperatures are more of a concern than low temperatures. One or two hours of high temperature (the high temperatures stated on Table 3) at the stage of anthesis can cause grain sterility to become large. With one growth stage being negatively affected, such as anthesis, unfortunate results follow. Thus, heat stress, although inevitable, needs to be avoided. Symptoms of heat stress are listed in Table