Ad-RiCCE: Adaptive Rice Cultivation for a Changing Climate
How can we transition to climate-resilient rice farming in a way that is both effective and fair? This project seeks to promote more climate resilience agriculture by rice farming in India by combining expertise in plant sciences, social sciences, and policy making.
Rice, the most consumed cereal in the world, is very sensitive to drought and heat. Inefficient use of water, burgeoning demand from other sectors, and rising global temperatures threaten the production of rice and the income of rice farmers. In India, despite efforts to develop water saving farming practices and rice varieties, neither water management nor improving rice production was attained due to the lack of converging efforts between scientists, policy makers, and farmers.
The Ad-RiCCE project seeks to combine the expertise of plant scientists, social scientists and policy makers in both India and the Netherlands to develop and disseminate water saving practices and water-productive varieties through a farmers’ participatory approach. The project specifically focuses on the Cauvery delta. The Cauvery is a major South Indian river, supports irrigation to over 5 million hectares of rice cultivation.
The Copernicus Institute contributes to this project by studying the societal implications of climate-resilient agriculture. We investigate how the introduction of water-saving innovation in rice cultivation affects existing practices for ensuring access to scare resources. The objective is to understand under what conditions the shift to climate-resilient agriculture can be a just transition.
The project is funded by the Dutch Science Council (NWO) and Department of Biotechnology, India (DBT) and runs from 2022 to 2027.