Life Cycle Assessment of an Alternative Method of Water Management to Reduce the Environmental Impact of Italian Rice Cultivation

Italy is the most important European country in terms of rice production. Nevertheless, rice farming in Italy is one of the crop systems with the highest impact on the environment. The main peculiarity of the rice cultivation practice is field water management: in fact, rice is cultivated keeping the soil submerged and in an anaerobic state. Under these conditions, organic matter degradation causes large methane emissions into the atmosphere. Previous studies show that methane emissions causes about 50% of climate change of rice production. This study reports the biennial results of the BESTsomRICE project in which the environmental performance of an alternative water management, characterized by an aeration period of the field during the cultivation, was evaluated. For this purpose, field trials were carried out for two consecutive years in northern Italy, a life cycle assessment approach was applied with a from-cradle-to-gate perspective, and 1 ton of rice grain at commercial moisture was chosen as the functional unit. The results confirm that methane emissions are responsible for 50% of global warming. Furthermore, alternative water management reduced global warming by 12% and 11% without affecting yield or the other impact categories analyzed.