Did you know it was impossible to grow rice in Hokkaido Japan. No one successfully grew rice there until the 1850s. Now Hokkaido produces 7.5% of the rice in Japan.
I thought I saw somewhere this happening, but as you know, this is a "workaround", not a fix.
Unless we stop using fossil fuels we will have a lot more to worry about. But we get a hint on exactly where we are going with the Iran war. The largest worry in the West is not the war, but price of oil raising. IMO, we should let it raise sky high to force a quick move to renewables.
As things are now, we are heading straight to +2.5C with no end in sight.
Seeing the comments, I think one thing missing is the availability of water. The authors mention it briefly, saying it's not part of the report,
> We focus primarily on temperature rather than precipitation or soil moisture, as water availability can be more readily controlled through human interventions, such as irrigation and paddy field construction.
Traditional rice cultivation normally involves flooding. So I am not sure how much one can rely on irrigation for rice. When I was younger, in Sao Paulo some Japanese immigrants were trying to raise Japanese rice species with flooding when I was young, but they gave up and moved to other crops as the weather in the southern area and Uruguay were better (that's what I was told growing up -- FWIW we had corn, sugarcane, orange until there was a huge pest in Barretos region, bamboo and lots of other fruits and veggies in the farm).
A couple of years ago my company (BSC in Spain) had an internal talk about impact of climate change in European vineyard. I don't remember the article they were talking about, but it was similar to this one: Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00521-5
From what I recall, what the researcher explained was that the change in water sources like rivers and lakes is already affecting wineries that are not able to grow certain crops due to the lack of water.
But due to the reduction in water levels, some wineries and types of grapes were not being able to be harvested in specific parts of Italy. The article above mentions something similar,
> Existing producers can adapt to a certain level of warming by changing plant material (varieties and rootstocks), training systems and vineyard management. However, these adaptations might not be enough to maintain economically viable wine production in all areas.
I guess there might be some genetic modification, and other techniques that do not require flooding and use less water. But that will likely affect small/medium producers, as well as and communities that depend on rice cultivation in certain areas.
Even with genetically modified rice, it might not be viable to bring water, or move families to other areas. So higher temperatures and the reduction of area that is suitable for harvesting rice might make genetically modifying rice useful only to a few.
I guess larger producers may be able to afford workarounds but that may increase cost to end users. Which is already a lot higher in Brazil than 10 years ago for normal and for the Japanese rice.
So what they're basically saying is global warming will open up whole new areas to rice cultivation offering jobs and economic prosperity to the areas given the massive price Asia will then be willing to pay due to lack of local supply
12 comments
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/rice-yields?time=earliest...
Did you know it was impossible to grow rice in Hokkaido Japan. No one successfully grew rice there until the 1850s. Now Hokkaido produces 7.5% of the rice in Japan.
Unless we stop using fossil fuels we will have a lot more to worry about. But we get a hint on exactly where we are going with the Iran war. The largest worry in the West is not the war, but price of oil raising. IMO, we should let it raise sky high to force a quick move to renewables.
As things are now, we are heading straight to +2.5C with no end in sight.
> We focus primarily on temperature rather than precipitation or soil moisture, as water availability can be more readily controlled through human interventions, such as irrigation and paddy field construction.
Traditional rice cultivation normally involves flooding. So I am not sure how much one can rely on irrigation for rice. When I was younger, in Sao Paulo some Japanese immigrants were trying to raise Japanese rice species with flooding when I was young, but they gave up and moved to other crops as the weather in the southern area and Uruguay were better (that's what I was told growing up -- FWIW we had corn, sugarcane, orange until there was a huge pest in Barretos region, bamboo and lots of other fruits and veggies in the farm).
A couple of years ago my company (BSC in Spain) had an internal talk about impact of climate change in European vineyard. I don't remember the article they were talking about, but it was similar to this one: Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00521-5
From what I recall, what the researcher explained was that the change in water sources like rivers and lakes is already affecting wineries that are not able to grow certain crops due to the lack of water.
But due to the reduction in water levels, some wineries and types of grapes were not being able to be harvested in specific parts of Italy. The article above mentions something similar,
> Existing producers can adapt to a certain level of warming by changing plant material (varieties and rootstocks), training systems and vineyard management. However, these adaptations might not be enough to maintain economically viable wine production in all areas.
I guess there might be some genetic modification, and other techniques that do not require flooding and use less water. But that will likely affect small/medium producers, as well as and communities that depend on rice cultivation in certain areas.
Even with genetically modified rice, it might not be viable to bring water, or move families to other areas. So higher temperatures and the reduction of area that is suitable for harvesting rice might make genetically modifying rice useful only to a few.
I guess larger producers may be able to afford workarounds but that may increase cost to end users. Which is already a lot higher in Brazil than 10 years ago for normal and for the Japanese rice.