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Journal articleIFPRI3; ISI; CRP2EPTD; PIMPRCGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM

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Climate change has great impact on cropping system. Understanding how the rice production system has historically responded to external forces, both natural and anthropogenic, will provide critical insights into how the system is likely to respond in the future. The observed historic rice movement provides insights into the capability of the rice production system to adapt to climate changes. Using province-level rice production data and historic climate records, here we show that the centroid of Chinese rice production shifted northeastward over 370 km (2.98°N in latitude and 1.88°E in longitude) from 1949 to 2010. Using a linear regression model, we examined the driving factors, in particular climate, behind such rice production movement. While the major driving forces of the rice relocation are such social economic factors as urbanization, irrigation investment, and agricultural or land use policy changes, climate plays a significant role as well. We found that temperature has been a significant and coherent influence on moving the rice center in China and precipitation has had a significant but less spatially coherent influence.

Knowledge of cropping areas and climate change is crucial to understanding the causes and consequences of global land use change, and the response of rice areas to climate change is a hot topic to global food security. This study investigates the impacts of climate change on suitable areas for rice cultivation and how the actual cultivated area of rice has been altered in response to climate change during the past three decades. To understand whether the shifts in the extent and location of rice cropping areas match the pattern of climate change, the yearly climate data from 726 weather stations and the rice census data from 2,343 counties were employed to simulate the climatically suitable region for rice using the MaxEnt species distribution model, as well as to model the actual geographical distribution of rice using the spatial allocation production model in each decade. The results show that approximately 3.9 % of all Chinese land area (roughly 3.7 9 10 7 ha) has become suitable for rice due to climate change over the past three decades, representing new potential areas for rice cultivation. Meanwhile, the actual rice cropping area has increased by approximately 18.2 %, indicating that the extent and location of the rice expansion match the pattern of climate change. However, some spatial inconsistencies did exist between the actual rice area's expansion and the climatically suitable region after 1990. Nevertheless, climate change was a possible factor impacting the geospatial and temporal changes of the actual rice cropping area in China.

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