Leading climate specialists and agricultural scientists have today warned that rapid climate change and its potential to intensify droughts and floods could threaten Asia's rice production and pose a significant threat to millions of people across the region. The warning coincides with the onset of Asia’s monsoon season.

"Climate change endangers crop and livestock yields and the health of fisheries and forests at the very same time that surging populations worldwide are placing new demands on food production," said Bruce Campbell of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). "These clashing trends challenge us to transform our agriculture systems so they can sustainably deliver the food required to meet our nutritional needs and support economic development, despite rapidly shifting growing conditions."

Southeast Asia has recently experienced dramatic meteorological swings, such as devastating flooding, which struck Thailand last year and followed a period of record drought in 2010. The researchers said that extreme and changeable weather events are having a marked effect on global food prices; they claim fluctuating prices are “stretching their [extreme weather’s] impact beyond immediate personal and ecological tragedies.”

"In the fields, there is no debate whether climate change is happening or not," said Raj Paroda of the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI). "Now, we must think about what the research community can provide governments to guide effective action. Given the region's current state of food insecurity, climate-smart agriculture has to become the central part of Asia's adaptation strategy."

South and Southeast Asia are home to more than one-third of the world's population and half of the world's poor and malnourished. Without adopting more resilient and lower impact approaches to food production, CGIAR researchers believe climate change in this region will reduce agricultural productivity by as much as 50 percent by 2050, when the Earth’s population is expected to reach 9 billion.

As farming, along with forestry and land use change, accounts for around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions and farming practices contributing to biodiversity loss around the world, farmers must focus on mitigating their impact on the environment and climate as well as coping with the effects of climate change. The researchers, working with the UN Development Programme (UNDP), this week organised a summit in Bangkok where delegates discussed climate smart approaches to agriculture.

Most Asian countries became food self-sufficient in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of investments made during the Green Revolution that ushered in new varieties of rice and other crops, wider irrigation and better water and crop management. Today, the mega-deltas of Asia's major rivers are the rice bowls for the world and are crucial to meeting global grain demand.

However, growing variability between seasons has increased pressures on water supplies, while at the same time rising sea levels are tainting freshwater supplies with high levels of salinity. Rice in Asia is grown in vast low-lying deltas and coastal areas such as the Mekong River delta, which produces more than half of Vietnam's rice; the rise in sea level from climate change will change the hydrology and salinity of these fields. Moreover, some of the major river basins—including the Chao Phraya in Thailand and the Red in Vietnam—are considered "closed" because all of the water flow has been claimed.

In South Asia, the Ganges and Indus river basins underpin the food security of well over a billion people. Yet danger signs are looming: 88 percent of Indians live in river basins with some form of water scarcity or food deficit. In Southeast Asia, despite the wider use of irrigation, approximately 75 percent of crops are still rain-fed and remain especially vulnerable to the vagaries of the climate.

For Thailand, managing the agricultural challenges presented by climate change means planning to handle both too much water and too little. In one solution, known as "Managed Aquifer Recharge" (MAR), land in upstream areas of major rivers is set aside to "capture" floodwater and direct it into natural underground aquifers. With fully charged aquifers, farmers could then maintain rice yields during dry spells.

Current flood preparations revolve around adjusting water levels of dams on the Chao Phraya. After the 2010 droughts, water levels were kept higher to make more water accessible to farmers during drier times. But this in turn limited the ability of the dams to accommodate the record monsoons that took place only a year later. Experts are looking now to MAR systems as a way to help farmers ride out the dry side of climate extremes without creating problems when the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction. MAR is also being implemented in regions of India.

Delegates at the summit in Bangkok also discussed the impact of livestock farming on water supplies and the environment. Environmentalists have suggested that current projections for increases in livestock production worldwide are not sustainable, and have warned that widespread increases risk impacting on biodiversity, water resources and could present public health risks.

This week, scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that, in order to curb nitrous oxide emissions, meat consumption in the developed world needs to be cut by 50 per cent per person by 2050 and emissions from the sector needs to be reduced by 50 per cent.

Purvi Mehta-Bhatt, head of the International Livestock Research Institute's (ILRI's) Asia region, said "It is important to consider livestock's impact on climate change, but you also need to consider climate change's impact on livestock, such as heat stress and the migration of Bluetongue disease and other illnesses."

It is thought that climate change will result in the spread of diseases to new regions and possibly cause the development of new diseases, as has been seen with the Schmallenberg Virus currently affecting Europe and the spread of new diseases, previously only seen further south, affecting Southern France and Italy.

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