Evaluating the impact of climate change on yield and water use efficiency of different dry-season rice varieties cultivated under conventional and alternate wetting and drying conditions

This study is the first attempt to assess rice cultivation under alternate wetting and drying (AWD) and continuous flooding (CF) using the latest scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), utilizing AquaCrop Model. Field experiments were conducted during the dry season 2023 to get the model calibration and validation input. We used two shared socioeconomic pathways scenarios (SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5) developed within Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) and projected the rice growth during 2040–2070. The simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of AquaCrop in capturing crop development across treatments and varieties. This model’s accuracy in simulating canopy cover (nRMSE = 14–32.5%), time series biomass (nRMSE = 22–42.5%), grain yield (Pd = 4.36–24.38%), and total biomass (nRMSE = 0.39–18.98%) was generally acceptable. The analysis of future climate shows an increasing trend in the monthly average temperature by 0.8 °C (Tmin) and 1.3 °C (Tmax) in both scenarios. While ETo values were not anticipated, rainfall was expected to increase with average values of 5.62 mm to 11.25 mm. In addition, the study found that varieties with growing periods longer than 93 days after transplanting (DAT), such as CAR15 and Sen Kra Ob, were most impacted by heat stress conditions, leading to reduced yield, harvest index (HI), and water use efficiency (WUE). In our case, CAR15 and Sen Kra Ob grain yields were reduced by 53% and 8%, respectively. AWD maintains superior WUE compared with CF regardless of the type of varieties, suggesting this technique is a drought-adaptive strategy.