Rice feeds more than half the world. It’s also the climate equivalent of 239 million cars
Rice is a staple food for over half the world's population, but its cultivation significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. A recent study found that emissions from rice paddies have nearly doubled since the 1960s, equating to the annual emissions of 239 million cars. While there are methods to reduce these emissions, further strategies are needed to effectively combat climate change.
- ▪Greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies have nearly doubled globally since the 1960s.
- ▪Rice cultivation is the largest emissions source in agriculture outside of livestock.
- ▪Using climate-smart practices could reduce global rice emissions by about 10% by midcentury.
Fortune files mainly under business. We currently carry 643 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/05/25/rice-climate-emissions-239-million-cars-solutions/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 15:27:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T15:57:38.249Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T15:57:38.249Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VpXMtn02OrFy |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Rice feeds more than half the world. From terraced paddies in Southeast Asia to irrigated fields in China and India, it underpins daily meals for billions of people.Recommended Video But the same flooded soils that help rice thrive also create ideal conditions for microbes that release climate-warming gases. In a new study, our team of environment and agriculture scientists found that greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies have nearly doubled globally since the 1960s, averaging about 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per year in the 2010s. That’s roughly equal to the annual emissions of 239 million cars. This makes rice-growing the largest emissions source in agriculture outside of livestock, and rice demand is expected to keep rising.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Fortune
