Extreme rainfall reduces one-twelfth of China’s rice yield

Abstract

Extreme climate events constitute a major risk to global food production. Among these, the extreme rainfall is often dismissed from historical analyses and future projections, whose impacts and mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we find that rice yield reductions due to extreme rainfall in China were comparable to those induced by extreme heat over the last two decades, reaching 7.6 ± 0.9% (one standard error) according to nationwide observations and 8.1 ± 1.1% according to the crop model incorporating the mechanisms revealed from manipulative experiments. Extreme rainfall reduces rice yield mainly by limiting nitrogen availability for tillering that lowers per-area effective panicles and by exerting physical disturbance on pollination that declines per-panicle filled grains. Considering these mechanisms, we projected ~8% additional yield reduction due to extreme rainfall under warmer climate by the end of the century. These findings demonstrate the critical importance to account for extreme rainfall in food security assessments, posing greater challenges to climate change adaptation.