Résumé
Rice is a staple food for over half of the world's population, playing a crucial role in global food security. Being a semi-aquatic plant, most rice is produced in fields kept under flooded conditions during the growing season, this conventional rice cultivation is a significant source of methane emissions due to continuous flooding. With the increasing importance of rice production in water-scarce environments and rising concerns about GHG emissions, Aerobic Rice AR is gaining renewed attention as a viable solution for sustainable farming. AR can reduce these emissions by up to 88% while also lowering water use. As water scarcity and GHG concerns grow, AR is recognized as a promising strategy for sustainable farming. A workshop on AR was held on 9-11 December 2024 in Montpellier, France, to assess the current state of AR research and define future directions across genetics, physiology, modelling and agronomy. This paper summarizes challenges and opportunities for AR identified during the workshop and a complementary literature review. First introduced in the 2000s (AR V1), AR was inspired by upland cropping systems. However, yield penalties compared to flooded rice have constrained its adoption. A new concept, AR V2, builds on lessons from AR V1 integrating systems-based agronomy with breeding and pre-breeding strategies focused on enhanced water uptake and yield potential under aerobic conditions. AR V2 proposed target domain areas in the tropics and subtropics. Each target domain should include: (i) designing and testing agronomic system-based design to sustain soil health, (ii) rapid development of high-yielding AR varieties integrating phenotyping and genetic tools to enhance water extraction and (iii) establishing methods to quantify the global impact of AR V2 on methane emissions and associated co-benefits. AR V2 requires the development of high yielding AR varieties reducing the risk of low yield under aerobic conditions, maintaining root water uptake and yield potential at a soil moisture around -20kPa. Research opportunities to enhance pre-breeding research for rice water uptake are described covering candidate traits, gene networks, phenotyping tools and genotypic diversity.