Revolutionizing Rice Cultivation: A Novel Low-Emission Rice Line to Mitigate Agriculture's Environmental CO2 Impact

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**Challenge:**Rice is a staple for nearly half of the world's 7 billion population and is mainly produced in south-east Asia (Mohanty\_2013). As the global population rises, to over nine billion by 2030, there will be huge pressure on land for food -- and rice yields must increase by 25% (Fernandez\_and\_Orth\_2018). However, rice yields are decreasing due to climate change (Zhao\_et\_al\_2017). In addition, rice cultivation accounts for 12% of global methane emissions (World\_Economics\_Forum\_2019), which is 30-times more a potent Green House Gas, than CO2 (National\_Geographic). Today, global rice production is doing as much harm as 1,200 average-sized coal power stations, and by 2030, will be responsible for 6% of total GHG emissions (We\_Forum\_2019). Despite sustained initiatives particularly in China, Japan, Korea and at the International Rice Research institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, established approaches are unable to produce high enough yields, and have effectively plateaued in China, Indonesia, Japan and Korea, and although rising linearly in some key countries such as India and Vietnam, the rates of increase are too slow to meet demand (Grassini\_and\_Cassman\_2013).**Solution:** This 24-month industrial research project between NIAB and Tropic advances the state-of-the-art in a plant product (rice) and it's production system (gene editing to increase rice yield), creating a unique UK technology and product export opportunity, and significantly contributes to Net Zero (reducing emissions from rice cultivation), demonstrated through glasshouse trials initially with field performance confirmation latterly (TRL7). We have already demonstrated that we can gene edit favourable traits into a variety of crops (e.g., disease resistant bananas and rice). We will use our previous know-how to build this novel production system, including technical work, utilising Knock-Down and Knock-Out gene editing to modify yield-related regions of interest in rice and select the best rice lines. By the end of this project, we will be in a position then utilise our patented 'GEiGS' technology to create non-GMO rice in several rice varieties, which we will then commercialise. Impact: Increasing rice yield, has the potential to massively cut GHG emissions, whilst producing more grain, and thus keeping the land-mass utilised constant. We have predicted that higher yielding rice could lead to a total CO2 reduction for rain-fed rice of 730 Kg CO2/ha, and for irrigated rice 1330 Kg CO2/ha.**_If everyone globally were to consume Tropic's rice, this could equate to savings of 433 million tonnes of CO2 annually_.**