The Philippines-based institution is devoting fresh efforts to mitigating the coming threat, but senior climate scientist Reiner Wassman said adequate funding had yet to materialize.
"Some of Asia's most important rice-growing areas are located in low-lying deltas, which play a vital role in regional food security and supplying export markets," Wassman told the institute (IRRI)’s magazine Rice Today.
"With Vietnam so dependent on rice grown in and around low-lying river deltas, the implications of a sea-level rise are ominous indeed."
Wassman said the impact of global warming on the key cereal "will depend on the actual patterns of change in rice-growing regions".
But he said a possible rise of between 10 and 85 centimeters in sea levels over the next century could have an "enormous" impact on some countries, including major rice exporter Vietnam.
Wassman said both higher maximum and higher minimum temperatures could decrease rice yields.
But he said the IRRI was optimistic and would be able to develop new varieties that could cope with higher temperatures.
Scientists were also confident that the resilience of rice production systems to climate extremes, such as floods and droughts, could be improved, he said.
However, he warned that it was unclear to what extent the impact of higher sea levels could be compensated for, and what the costs and socioeconomic consequences of any such changes would be.
Highly vulnerable
A report by the Britain's Department for International Development said in February that Vietnam could be among the countries worst hit by climate change and rising sea levels.
"Vietnam potentially is one of the countries where sea level rises could have the most dramatic impact," said Mark Lowcock, a senior department official.
He said that nearly a quarter of the population in Vietnam could be directly affected.
Vietnam, with a population of 84 million, has over 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) of coastline.
It suffered 10 typhoons and severe storms last year, and concentrates much of its food production, not only rice, in the low-lying Mekong Delta.
If sea levels rose by one meter, Vietnam would lose more than 12 percent of its land, home to 23 percent of its people, a British government paper said.
Climate change could also bring "more frequent and severe typhoons," and rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns would also affect Vietnam's agriculture and water resources, it said.
Source: Independent Online |
