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Although rice requires wet conditions to grow, it cannot survive being submerged for too long. In the tropics, the unpredictability of flooding poses a massive risk. Because rice farmers plant seeds without knowing how much flooding there will be in the season ahead, they have little control over the impact of floods on their final harvest.
Global warming will only increase the unpredictability and scale of floods in the tropics. Fortunately, advances in biotechnology allow scientists to engineer flood-tolerant varieties of rice. The Swarna-Sub1 variant has seen great success in India, giving rice farmers a means to mitigate flood risk and damage. In 2012 and 2013, economists surveyed a sample of 1,200 Indian farmers and found those who adopted this flood-tolerant variety increased their yields by about 840 pounds per hectare, or 13.5 percent.
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