Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Greenhouse Gases Emission from Rice Paddy
Ecosystem and their Management
T. B. Dakua, L. Rangan and Sudip Mitra
1 Introduction
The agriculture sector is one of the major sources of Greenhouse gases (GHGs).
According to Sharma et al. (
2011
), agriculture sector contributed 19 % of total
CO
2
equivalent emissions in India in 2007 and within the agriculture sector, rice
cultivation is a major source of emission of Greenhouse gases in the form of CH
4
.
At several regional and global conventions, the options for the mitigation of emis-
sion of GHGs have been discussed widely. Several studies indicated that methane
emission from rice fields can be mitigated through modification of crop culti-
vation practices like manure and fertilizer management, irrigation management,
practice of 'No Tillage', 'Reduced Tillage', adoption of conservation agriculture,
crop rotation and various alternative crop management measures, etc. However,
in most of the cases, the yield of the crop is often negatively impacted. Improve-
ment of crop varieties has been considered by many scholars as a viable option for
reduction of methane emission without impacting the productivity of the crop as
methane flux from rice fields is dependent on various cultivar specific properties
like properties of root exudates, root porosity and permeability, features of the
aerenchyma tissue, stage of the crop growth, methane conductance through the
stem, photosynthate allocation efficiency, etc. Modification of such cultivar spe-
cific properties that can significantly reduce CH
4
emission, through appropriate
crop improvement techniques should be the future research arena for mitigation of
GHG emission from rice cultivation.
