“As rice is a dietary staple in many parts of the world, these changes could lead to a substantial rise in the global burden of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and other arsenic-related health issues,” said Lewis Ziska, an environmental health sciences professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, in a press release. The new study was published on Wednesday in The Lancet Planetary Health.
The researchers combined observational science with modeling to examine arsenic levels in rice. They studied what increasing CO2 and temperature did to 28 strains of paddy rice over 10 years, and then used that data to model out what might happen to the rice supply in seven Asian countries out to 2050. They found that the temperature and CO2 act synergistically to significantly increase inorganic arsenic concentrations, primarily by changing soil chemistry in ways that increase uptake of the arsenic into rice plants.
The study also includes some estimates of what consumption of this arsenic-enhanced rice will mean for human health. They anticipate a sharp increase in certain kinds of cancer, in particular lung and bladder cancer; in China alone, they estimate that 13.4 million arsenic-related cancers will occur in 2050. The changes would likely also raise risks of heart disease, diabetes, and other problems.
Understanding this risk does offer some ways to try and mitigate it. The most obvious, given the synergistic effects of CO2 and temperature, is to cut greenhouse emissions rapidly; even though the system’s inertia means temperatures will still rise for some time, decoupling the two curves could reduce the arsenic uptake problem. Beyond that, it may be possible to breed strains of rice that have lower arsenic uptake, even as more becomes available in the soil. “Such measures, along with public health initiatives focused on consumer education and exposure monitoring, could play a critical role in mitigating the health impacts of climate change on rice consumption,” Ziska said.
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