The Philippines produces approximately 3% of the world’s rice in both “lowland” flooded transplanted paddies and “upland” rainfed direct seeded areas. Rice–which provides nearly half the calories for half the world’s population –is a key crop for the Philippines: it is a staple food (with >110 kg/person/year consumption,, ), the sixth highest per capita consumption in the world), as well as a major source of income (rice production valued at ~6 billion U.S. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Future climate projection data were obtained from the CMIP5 database for the business-as-usual scenario RCP 8.5 ( ).įunding: MFS was supported by the Institute for Basic Science (project code IBS- R028-D1) and the NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, administered by UCAR's Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Sciences (CPAESS) and MT was funded by a grant from the Tamaki Foundation. Surface air temperature (2m) was obtained from the ERA-Interim reanalysis on a 0.125º horizontal grid ( ). Soil moisture data were obtained from CPC (version 2) at 0.5º horizontal resolution (35) ( ). ENSO variability was characterized using the Niño3.4 (N3.4) index, which is calculated as the area averaged sea surface temperature anomalies from HadISST1 ( ) in the region 170°W-120°W and 5°S-5°N. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data was sourced from the following third party providers: Rice production data from 1987-2016 were obtained from the Philippine government statistic authority ( ). Received: FebruAccepted: JPublished: August 9, 2018Ĭopyright: © 2018 Stuecker et al. PLoS ONE 13(8):Įditor: Vanesa Magar, Centro de Investigacion Cientifica y de Educacion Superior de Ensenada Division de Fisica Aplicada, MEXICO Detailed case studies like this complement global yield studies and provide important local perspectives that can help in food policy decisions.Ĭitation: Stuecker MF, Tigchelaar M, Kantar MB (2018) Climate variability impacts on rice production in the Philippines. Therefore, skillful seasonal prediction will likely become increasingly crucial to provide the necessary information to guide agriculture management to mitigate the compounding impacts of soil moisture variability and temperature stress. Our results show that while temperature variability is of limited importance in the Philippines today, future climate projections suggest that by the end of the century, temperatures might regularly exceed known limits to rice production if warming continues unabated. About 10% of the variance in rice production anomalies on the national level co-varies with soil moisture changes, which in turn are strongly negatively correlated with an index capturing ENSO variability. As expected, rainfed upland rice production systems are more sensitive to soil moisture variability than irrigated paddy rice. We found that the climate impacts on rice production are strongly seasonally modulated and differ considerably by region. Over this period, rice production is affected by variations in soil moisture, which are largely driven by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Here we explore the impact of climate variability on rice yield and production in the Philippines from 1987–2016 in both irrigated and rainfed production systems at various scales. Disentangling the role of these various influences helps us understand the capacity of agriculture to adapt to change.
Changes in crop yield and production over time are driven by a combination of genetics, agronomics, and climate.