Paddy rice production creates significant methane emissions in comparison to other cropping systems.
The Paddy Rice Research Group (PRRG) is working together to find ways to reduce the emissions intensity of paddy rice cultivation systems, while improving its overall production efficiency. Trade-offs with emissions of nitrous oxide and changes of the quantity of carbon stored in paddy soils are also being considered.
The Group’s activities are completed by two sub-Groups that focus on regional rice production systems:
- The Latin American sub-Group including CIAT as partner (PRRG-Americas)
- The Asia sub-Group (PRRG-Asia)
The Group’s work is focused on improving countries’ national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions from paddy rice cultivation systems.
The Group will also help provide knowledge of source/sink extents and mitigation options to paddy rice farmers, land managers and policy makers by looking at the impacts of water management, organic matter and fertilisers, and cultivar selection.
The Paddy Rice Group has a particular focus on identifying good practice and gaps in current knowledge, standardising measurement techniques, and developing improved country-specific emission factors and mitigation options. Relevant literature is being compiled in a database. Over time, the Group will look at how to scale up results across countries and extrapolate solutions to the long term. A future goal is the development of an experimental protocol for a multi-site, multi-country field experiment.
Paddy Rice Research Group Co-Chairs
Dr Yasuhito Shirato
National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences (NIAES)
yshirato@naro.affrc.go.jp
