How Is KR 3.4 Tracking?
A dietary staple for more than 3 billion people, rice provides 20 percent of all calories consumed worldwide. It also accounts for at least 12 percent of the globe’s methane emissions.
Rice farming is an emissions challenge because standard paddy flooding practices generate methane from pools of water.
Hundreds of thousands of farmers around the world are already reducing methane with intermittent flooding of their rice paddies, a planet-friendly alternative to continuous flooding.
Besides eliminating up to two-thirds of methane emissions, this practice can double a rice farmer’s yield and sharply boost profits.
But it comes with a catch: intermittent flooding can drastically increase nitrous oxide emissions, which pack a planetary-heating punch three hundred times more powerful than CO2. To avoid this unintended consequence, water levels must be closely monitored and managed. Shallow flooding, together with nitrogen management, can abate this seesaw effect and cut a rice farmer’s emissions up to 90 percent.
Data for KR 3.4 is sourced from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and from the Sustainable Rice Platform, which reports its membership figures annually.