The climate change effect might eat up more than 27 per cent of the paddy yield in Bangladesh by 2050, experts said Wednesday.
Besides, the rising natural calamities like salinity, flash flood, stagnant flood, tidal flood, drought, cold, heat could also reduce paddy yield by nearly 64 per cent within 2070, they said.
Director General of Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) Dr Jiban Krishna Biswas said that due to the multilateral consequences of climate changes, per hectare yield of paddy can decline to 4 tonnes in 2030 from 5.5 tonnes now.
He was speaking at the concluding ceremony of the two day long workshop styled "'Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions from Rice Field: Finding Mitigation through Urea Deep Placement (UDP) and Alternative Wetting and Drying (AWD) Technology'" as the chief guest.
The ceremony of the workshop held at the BRRI Auditorium in Gazipur, organised jointly by the International Fertiliser Development Centre (IFDC) under the Accelerating Agriculture Productivity Improvement (AAPI) project of the USAID, BRRI and Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU).
Dr Jiban Krishna presented a paper which showed that due to increasing trend of natural calamities like salinity, flash flood, stagnant flood, tidal flood, drought, cold, heat caused by climatic changes paddy production at per hectare will fall to just 2 tonnes within 2070 from the present output.
The study is prepared considering the pattern of minimum and maximum temperature of last 30 years---from 1975 to 2008.
It showed the minimum temperature, in last 30 years, has increased in all months except in January and November.
While maximum temperature also increased in all months except January during the period.
The study also takes in account the rainfall pattern of the country from 1975 to 2005, the paper said.
However, the research revealed that 2.0 million hectares of total rice areas have been affected by flash flood submergence.
"Flash floods can result in yield loss up to 100 per cent depending on different climatic and agronomic factors," it showed.
It also showed 2.0 million hectares areas have been affected by drought both in dry and wet season.
Natural calamity is causing 5 per cent average yield decline annually worth US $23.9 million, the paper said.
Dr Jiban Krishna said that to cope with the changing climatic condition, we will have to adapt time befitting technologies.
Developing new seed varieties suitable to different climatic condition based on various agronomic zones of the country, adapting technologies like UDP, AWD, IPM (integrated pest management) can combat any catastrophe, he said.
However, Dr Biswas informed the newsmen that the BRRI is going to release some new stress tolerant rice varieties within few weeks.
Meanwhile, the IFDC (under AAPI) with the collaboration of BRRI and BAU has taken a project to measure and mitigate green house gases (GHG) from rice fields.
Ms Ishrat Jahan, Resident Representative, IFDC Bangladesh and Project Coordinator and Chief of Party of the AAPI provided an over view of some salient research findings on reducing nitrogen losses in Bangladesh through UDP and AWD technologies.
She said UDP can reduce urea use by one-third while increase rice yield up to 15 per cent.
Dr Md Shahjahan Kabir, Director, BRRI, Dr Reiner Wassmann, Senior Scientist and Coordinator of Rice and Climate Change Consortium, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), AAPI Deputy Chief of Party Dr Yam Kanta Gaihre among others also spoke.
