Assessment of Climate Change Impact on Water Requirement and Rice Productivity

Assessing the impact of climate change (CC) on agricultural production systems is mainly done using crop models associated with climate model outputs. This review is one of the few, with the main objective of providing a recent compendium of CC impact studies on irrigation needs and rice yields for a better understanding and use of climate and crop models. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of climate impact studies on agricultural production systems, with a particular focus on uncertainty and sensitivity analyses of crop models. Although the new generation global climate models (GCMs) are more robust than previous ones, there is still a need to consider the effect of climate uncertainty on estimates when using them. Current GCMs cannot directly simulate the agro-climatic variables of interest for future irrigation assessment, hence the use of intelligent climate tools. Therefore, sensitivity and uncertainty analyses must be applied to crop models, especially for their calibration under different conditions. The impacts of CC on irrigation needs and rice yields vary across regions, seasons, varieties and crop models. Finally, integrated assessments, the use of remote sensing data, climate smart tools, CO₂ enrichment experiments, consideration of changing crop management practices and multi-scale crop modeling, seem to be the approaches to be pursued for future climate impact assessments for agricultural systems.