Climatic Change (2007) 80:395–409 DOI 10.1007/s10584-006-9122-6 Assessing the impacts of climate change on rice yields in the main rice areas of China Fengmei Yao · Yinglong Xu · Erda Lin · Masayuki Yokozawa · Jiahua Zhang Received: 2 March 2005 / Accepted: 8 March 2006 / Published online: 9 January 2007 C  Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract This paper assesses the impact of climate change on irrigated rice yield using B2 climate change scenario from the Regional Climate Model (RCM) and CERES-rice model during 2071–2090. Eight typical rice stations ranging in latitude, longitude, and elevation that are located in the main rice ecological zones of China are selected for impact assessment. First, Crop Estimation through Resource and Environment Synthesis (CERES)-rice model is validated using farm experiment data in selected stations. The simulated results represent satisfactorily the trend of flowering duration and yields. The deviation of simulation within ±10% of observed flowering duration and ±15% of observed yield. Second, the errors of the outputs of RCM due to the difference of topography between station point and grid point is corrected. The corrected output of the RCM used for simulating rice flowering duration and yield is more reliable than the not corrected. Without CO 2 direct effect on crop, the results from the assessment explore that B2 climate change scenario would have a negative impact on rice yield at most rice stations and have little impacts at Fuzhou and Kunming. To find the change of inter-annual rice yield, a preliminary assessment is made based on comparative cumulative probability at low and high yield and the coefficient variable of yield between the B2 scenario and baseline. Without the CO 2 direct effect on rice yield, the result indicates that frequency for low yield would increase and it reverses for high yield, and the variance for rice yield would increase. It is concluded that high frequency at low yield and high variances F. Yao () College of Earth Sciences, the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19A, Yuquan Road, Beijing 100049, China e-mail: yaofm@gucas.ac.cn Y. Xu () · E. Lin Agricultural Environment and Sustainable Development Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China e-mail: xuyl@ami.ac.cn M. Yokozawa National Institute for Agro-environmental Sciences, Tsukuba, 305-8604, Japan J. Zhang Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, 100081, China Springer