 So, once again, welcome all panelists and those who are watching the program live to this first session on impact of climate change on rubber and potential changes in the geography of production. We have five presentations and now I see Dr. Philip Tyler is on board, so all the speakers are in place. Shall we start? All right, so as per the program, the first speaker is myself. I will spend about 10 minutes to make the presentation. Hope you are able to see the slides. So I will quickly go through the slides and then wait for your questions, comments, etc. Impact of climate change on rubber cultivation in India. The session outline is as follows. Climate change in rubber growing regions over the decades. Impact of climate change on rubber cultivation and strategies for adaptation to changed climate. Let us have a quick look at the changes in climate that has happened in the various rubber growing regions in India. So coming to India, we know this part of the world from where most of natural rubber is produced is highly vulnerable to adverse effects of climate change. And in India, these are the places where rubber is grown. This is the traditional belt where temperature is more equatorial. This is the hot and dry belt. And this is the northeast India where the temperatures can be very cold during winter. And in these different regions, let us quickly see how climate has changed over the years. This is a compilation of temperature data that we have collected from the Rubber Research Institute campus at Kottayam, which is in the traditional hot land of rubber cultivation in India. Okay, this curve here is the moving average of daily temperature between the period 1957 and the 61. And the red curve is the mean for the period 2015, 2019. And it's very obvious that temperature has shot up. This is the mean daily maximum temperatures over a period of roughly 60 years we see mean temperature has gone up. And here it is the monthly average of the same data you see the mean monthly temperature has gone up by almost 2.2 degrees Celsius over a period of 60 years. If you look at the mean maximum temperature, it has gone up by 2.6 degrees centigrade. And if you look at the mean minimum temperature, it has gone up by 1.7 degrees centigrade. As we all know, ambient temperature, the air temperature has got an immediate and direct impact on daily latex production. Climate warming has been happening in different parts of the traditional rubber growing belt. As you can see from these two graphs over the years, you see the temperature going up steadily. This is how temperature has warmed up in the northeastern region. In this particular case, it is Agartala, that is in the northeastern state of Tripura, where the mean monthly maximum temperature has gone up between 2009 and 2018 as compared to 2069 and 2078. So this is the long-term average and this is the more recent 10-year average where you see the temperature has gone up. Another data we have from various places where rubber is grown in India. So in a nutshell, both T-max and T-minimum have gone up. Number of hot days and number of warm nights every month have gone up. Number of bright sunshine hours per day has gone up, so it has come down. And annual rainfall did not show any clear trend, but rainfall distribution has become more unpredictable. Because of these changes in the temperature and rainfall pattern, we have been witnessing occurrence of extreme weather events in the recent years, both in terms of the frequency and severity of heavy rainfall events leading to floods, heat waves, droughts, unexpected break in monsoon, cyclonic storms, etc. Climate warming has been perhaps the most significant and most spectacular change that we have been noticing in the rubber growing regions throughout the country and perhaps in other countries as well. Weather has been progressively warming by at the rate of 0.04 degrees Celsius per year in the traditional regions and 0.024 degrees Celsius per year in northeastern India. And rainfall pattern has been changing in an unpredictable manner in the NR Plantation Wells of the country. So what do these changes mean to rubber cultivation? Because of unpredictability in the monsoon rains, we see sometimes the crop stand coming down or the survival percentage, particularly in the first year going down. Because of unpredictability in the weather parameters, the drought rate has slowed down tremendously and this has a direct impact on prolonging the gestation period. Because of severe weather events occurring, particularly warming conditions, productivity is generally coming down. And there has been a shift in the climatically most favorable region for cultivating rubber in the country. The natural rubber landscape of India is definitely witnessing significant changes. So it's a serious concern about new emerging percent diseases thanks to changes in the weather parameters. This is an example of how we have made use of vegetation temperature condition index VTCI as a proxy measure to measure drought. The red color indicates drought and the green color indicates less drought, as you can read from the legend here. So this is the state of Kerala where and the particular district of Tamil Nadu where rubber is a major agricultural crop. And you can see the red patches increasing in the area, meaning more areas are getting affected by drought. Now if these areas have very young rubber plantations, sometimes the young plants will die, will just dry like you see here. And if there are mature plantations in this hot area, then productivity will come down. We have seen that even up to 18% of young holdings, life-saving irrigation has been given in the traditional area in recent years, which has been unheard of maybe 10, 12 years ago. Impact of climate warming is different in different and are growing regions in the country. This is some very important lesson that we have learned. Maybe this has applications to other and are growing countries as well. As climate warming continues, more areas in Northeast India may become suitable for growing rubber, but traditional areas may become less suitable. Non-traditional areas like North, Concord and Central India are likely to become extremely difficult for cultivating this crop. But the silver lining is that more areas in Northeast India where now we are focusing more on expanding rubber cultivation, there is a possibility of getting more areas suitable for rubber cultivation. This is a summary data based on our realized yield from the field, based on mathematical modeling, making use of existing data. This is not a prediction, but the base use of existing data to relate how much productivity was affected when temperature rose by 1 degree centigrade. We can see in Northeastern region, when temperature rose by 1 degree centigrade, there was hardly any reduction in productivity. As you see more traditional regions like Kerala, Central Kerala, for a unit degree increase in temperature, there has been a substantial reduction in productivity. This is based on actual data that we have collected from the field over the decades. Now this is a prediction for the future. The geography that we see here is entire Northeastern India. So we have China here, Myanmar here, Thailand, Indonesia, etc., down here. This is Northeastern India where we are now cultivating rubber. We made use of ecological niche modeling based on the principle of maximum entropy. And I don't want to go into the details of the EMM model, ecological niche modeling, in this presentation for want of time. But you see the outcome, which is based on 19 weather parameters that are prevailing in the region as compared to the original habitat or center of origin of Hibiya, Brazil. As of 2015, the non-blue color area is the region where there is a greater probability of cultivating natural rubber. Come 2050, you see the non-blue colors, particularly the more reddish colors. You read from the legend here, the non-blue colors are expanding. Now blue color means the probability of occurrence of rubber in that region is zero. Red color means probability is definite one. So in between color means there is varying probability of expansion of rubber cultivation to that region. See come 2050 and for a perennial tree crop like rubber 2050 is not a long time into the future, you see more areas may become better suited for growing rubber. I'm not showing the data corresponding data for the traditional areas where we see that best suited areas in the traditional areas will be shrinking, which means the rubber geography or the natural rubber landscape of the country is poised to see major changes in the coming decades thanks to climate change. See this is the maximum capacity for production of natural rubber in India. This is historical data, maximum production potential and this is the maximum potential production into the future according to the current replanting, new planting rates. But you see the realized yields have been slightly below the maximum potential right now and when the rubber prices were very high the realized yield was well above the maximum potential because of over exploitation etc. And our consumption has been rising and enough consumption in India is definitely predicted to go up for obvious reasons I am not filling the gap here that is a current one or two years because there is going to be a blip in consumption. So I don't want to predict the values here, but even by assuming 1% growth in natural rubber consumption in India, so this is the way our consumption is going to go up. Now 1% growth year over year in NR consumption in India is an under estimate. So I expect this to be somewhere there and thanks to climate change and impact of extreme weather events, maximum potential production or the capacity for production might shrink. Therefore climate change will seriously dent the NR demand supply equation in the country in the coming years we have already begun to see that happening. Coming to the last session of my talk strategies for adaptation to climate change. Of course we have to come up with the agronomic practices that are climate resilient. We have data from India as well as from various countries to show that some amount of intercropping is good for rubber cultivation. That is because when the plants are very young and if they are exposed to severe drought or severe cold temperature, the prevailing high light conditions will aggravate the stress and there is beautiful science behind that why light can be harmful to plants when they are experiencing environmental stress. So giving a partial shade through proper scientific intercropping is definitely a climate resilient agronomic practice. Mulching in mature plantations either through natural mulch or through artificial mulching you are conserving soil moisture which will help to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change in young plantations. Allowing natural wheat flora to grow particularly dichotes away from the rhizosphere in young plantations we have enough data to show that that will help in conserving the physical, chemical and biological properties of the soil particularly the soil moisture holding capacity. Effective nutrient management particularly through potassium nutrition and of course giving life saving irrigation which has shown you some data you know can it has become a practice in at least 18 to 20 percentage of the small holdings in India and partial irrigation from 0.25 to 0.5 ETC we have been able to mitigate I mean agronomically mitigate adverse effects. But I think the long shot and we have already put our hands on this is to develop climate resilient clones for example RRE430 has got much better climate resilience capacity than RRE105 or RREM600. So this is our strategy for using genomic markers to help in identifying or selecting climate resilient clones you know you look for fingerprint for ATP production, key enzymes in the rubber biosynthesis pathway or key enzymes and genes associated with drought tolerance, cold tolerance, antioxidant capacity, protection of photosynthetic machinery etc. For which the whole genome sequence data that that we have produced in the recent years would be a very very powerful and handy tool. And before I say thank you I just want to say that it's also important that we properly project the carbon sequestration potential of rubber plantations vis-a-vis the very powerful positive carbon footprint of synthetic rubber but we have to have synthetic rubber but we should not shy away from projecting the great impact of rubber plantations in sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide and the possibility of setting up a voluntary carbon market at least among the NR growing countries and how best the CSR funds of major rubber consuming industries particularly the tire industries can be channeled into the small holdings natural rubber plantations which sequester huge quantities of carbon dioxide and thus mitigate climate change. It is really gratifying to see that they are first taken by IRRDB to begin with and then NRPC and now IRST and a host of other international agencies to look at climate change and its impact on natural rubber cultivation very seriously and to come up with the adaptation and mitigation strategies. So thank you very much. May I hand over the mic to the host or shall I invite the next speaker? Vincent? Yes please Dr. Jacob please go ahead with the lineup of speakers. Okay I think for I mean to be more convenient if we invite the questions at the end of the session as it is given in the program. So I call upon Dr. Eric Gohey Siraj to give your presentation. Can you please now start sharing your slides please? Yes thank you Dr. James. I'm very honored to be a part of this workshop and I say good morning and good afternoon to everyone. So I will present say the presentation that we have prepared with my colleagues of CIRAD, Philippe, Ian, Regis and Frédéric and the title is Worldwide Climate Typologies of Lover Tree Cultivation, Risk and Opportunities Linked to Climate Change. So first of all I want to stress the importance of natural rubber in our world. Natural rubber is a green substitute to petrol. It is representing about 47 percent of the global elastomer market and at the moment there is no credible or sustainable substitution by other compounds at the moment because natural rubber has the particularity to be made mainly of cis polyazoprene when all say the synthetic rubbers are mainly trans polyazoprene. And this stereoschemic property gives specific properties to the natural rubber especially regarding the adhesive properties and the high resistance to physical constraints regarding pressure and heat. And so that's the reason why we say the natural rubber market at the moment is still involved in almost 75 percent for tires. It is a major part of car radial tires of the truck plane and bulldozer tires. It's a major part of all the anti-vibration systems and the anti-cystmic equipment. And the conclusion of that is that natural rubber is now a strategic material. Any natural rubber shortage will result in a civilization shock regarding the freight and the transport disruption. And that's why it's very important to anticipate any changes in production conditions and to adapt to it. And we are at the moment experiencing the COVID-19 crisis. Just an example what would be the current world status in case of a natural rubber shortage resulting in fighters operation description which will induce a total description of international medical supplies for masks for medicines for respirators and a total description of food supply and delivery. We cannot envisage that. So we have to adapt. The problem as Dr. James I said showing the real case is that all the international panel for climate change scenarios forecast an increase in temperature. Both for minimum temperatures, maximum temperatures, mean temperatures plus two plus 3.5 degrees before 2100. At the same time it plans relative stability of the total rainfall amount but modifications of the rainfall display. Increase rainfall during the rainy season is likely. Decrease rainfall during the dry season is likely. Increase frequency of extreme events has already started storms, typhoons, winds, floods and droughts. And there is a major problem which is the imprecise downscaling at local and regional levels. Dr. James showed that it cannot be predicted precisely. Climate change will also raise the atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the possible likely developments of new pests and diseases. In brief, those new climatic conditions will impact. It's not cool impact. It will impact the biology and the physiology of the rubber tree with effects on growth, on yield and even survival. In Sirat, in 2015 we proposed a climatic description of the main climate for rubber cultivation with the possible climates with temperatures, average temperatures between 23 and 28 degrees. The rainfall should be above 1100. The number of dry months should be below 5. And the number of cold months should be below 5. And from this, it is possible to discriminate between traditional and marginal climates. I do not detail. From these parameters, we can derive five climatic indices. One for temperature, one for windfall, one for the dry season month, one for the cold season month and one for the climate amplitude. And the climatic composite marginality index has been described by ourselves and has been taken over in Vietnam by Ngoc Nguyen in 2016 to describe four main climatic classes. One, traditional warm and humid and three, marginal warm and dry, cold and humid and cold and dry. From this typology, we could derive 20 different possible climates and five intensities of climatic marginality. What is very interesting there is that at the moment said the marginality for has been described regarding temperature only for the cold climate. It's impossible at the moment to discriminate between traditional and marginal areas because of high temperature. Because the rubber tree has never been planted until now in areas with mean annual temperatures above 28 degrees. And so there is uncertainty. The possible effect of higher temperature, which is planned by all IPCC climatic scenarios on growth, on yield, and even survival of the rubber tree is therefore almost unknown. If we analyze this climatic typology and the decision tree based on those climatic indices, we have four main classes, the class one, which is the typical sub-tropical climate of the warm and humid marginality levels from zero to two. There you have zero to medium impact on growth and yield. It covers above 90% of the current growing areas. The second class is the warm and dry climate. The marginality level increases from one to three. It gathers all the recent extensions to less favorable areas, less rainfall, and longer dry seasons. And it results in little to severe impact on growth and yield. There you have the Côte d'Ivoire, the new development in the savannah, northeast Thailand, northwest Cambodia. The class three, cold and humid marginality level increases from one to four. You have the recent extensions to higher latitudes or altitudes. The effect on the rubber is little to very severe. It includes China, the Yunnan and the island areas, Brazil, the South Polo area, India, Assam, and James just talked about it, in the North Vietnam, the northeast Cambodia, the Gavin, and the southeast Camo. And finally, the class four, which is very, very marginal, as it is cold and dry. The marginality levels there are maximum because there is a trend to continental climate. You have the medium to very severe impact on growth and yield. And you can find it mainly in Matagorso in Brazil or in some areas of North Thailand. If you apply this composite climatic marginality index in Cambodia to describe, as an example, the rubber production provinces, you see the display of the composite marginality index. You have the class one, climate, warm and humid, southwest, the southwest, where there is almost no climatic marginality, and the center and the southeast, which are a little bit more marginal because of longer dry season. You have the northwest of the country, which is warm and dry. And you have finally the latest developments, which are cold and humid in the northeast, in the provinces of Rotanakery and Mondokery. And for this climate, we say we need the adaptation of the good agricultural practices. And there will be a different incidence of climatic change depending on each region. The scenarios of IPCC increase, plan an increase in temperature from 2 degrees to 3.5 degrees. From 28 degrees now, maximum now to 30 degrees and 31 degrees. And this is what we call the global warming. And under these conditions, many questions arise. What would be the impact on the sustainability of the natural rubber production on our warmer and drier climates with increased temperature, increased contrast with between dry and wet seasons and longer dry seasons? What would be the impact on the current climatic classes? There is uncertainty. What is the reliability of the models to set up the future of GAPs? And what is the possible downscaling of the climate predictions at the local or regional level? The risk linked to increased temperatures. The behavior of the rubber tree under annual mean temperature above 28 degrees is currently unknown and unpredictable until no rubber tree has never been planted in areas where the temperature is above 28. What would be the impact on the growth? What would be the impact on the yield? What would be the growth and adaptation of the rubber plants under these new coming high temperatures? And what would be the impact on the yield? Let's remind that the latex flow after tapping is linked to the internal trigger pressure in the latex vessels. And this is the reason why all rubber plants do step at night or in the early morning when the daily temperature is the lowest and the latex trigger pressure is the highest. What would happen if the temperature rates increase in air temperature will lead to higher VPD and higher stomatal conductance, street transpiration and water status. It will also affect photosynthesis, respiration, carbon allocations and physiology of the latex vessels. Two higher temperatures will increase the risk of water stress disorders like xylem and bolism or cavitation creating disruption in water uptake. May have impact on the soil functioning and quality due to modifications of soil moisture and flora and fauna. As the latex production totally depends on carbohydrate availability and tree water status, as the latex itself is composed of about 60 to 65 percent of water, there are large uncertainty and low knowledge gaps. And just an example to show you what can happen when you have associated heat waves and very severe water stress. This is observation of di-bac and troic necrosis observed in the northeast of Thailand in 2005. So anticipating what we are observing now in a more global way, this is a risk. The risk increased to link to the increased contrast between seasons will result in the lengthening of dry seasons to affect the immature growth. In fact, when you have no dry season in the north of Sumatra, for instance, you turn up on the trees at 4.5 to 5 years old. But when you have five months of dry season, you have to wait for nine years to reach the same girl. Adaptation, as James mentioned, we need clones adapted to growth. We need to manage the planting techniques like mulching the soil coverage to maintain the soil moisture or to limit evaporation. Irrigation, I put a question mark on irrigation because usually when you need to irrigate, there is no water available or limited. And selective growth stocks for increased water use efficiency. And there will be over aspects linked to climate change and the frequency of extreme events as Thai foods are causing wind damage on the left. Increased risk of flooding like we saw in the last years in south of Thailand and also in Kerala last year. And also increased in atmospheric CO2 consolidation as well as new diseases and pests. You see here a plot of pestalutopsis, new diseases affected. So what will be the impact per class of climate? In the climatic class 1, which are covering 90% of the traditional areas, there is, as James mentioned, a risk of a positive progressive shift to class 2. These areas may become warm and dry. And so there is an urgent need to research and adaptation of practices, the clones, the planting, the soil cover, the mulching, the irrigation, the stimulation displayed. The efficiency of agroforestry and cover crops must be assessed in these new conditions as the synergy competition, which is well known and described, can be shifted to competition for water and nutrient subsets in conditions of increased water stress. And soil functioning too in a changing environment. The climatic class 2, warm and dry, is likely the first affected if temperature is higher than 28 degrees. They will be detrimental to rubber growth and production. The risk of increasing severity of dry seasons questions the future sustainability of rubber cultivation in those areas. James mentioned also this for the center in the conditions. Adaptations of practices in unlikely to able to solve the problems there. By contrast, the situation of class 3 and the cold and humid classes of class 4, cold and dry, might improve the current class 3, cold and humid zones, might even become the best areas for rubber cultivation if temperature is increased by 23 degrees. So there is a possible shift to class 1, warm and humid. Beware, this mean must be very careful about this regarding policy of plantings. This might be a possible cause for one new change. It should be very well monitored, associated with strict policies to avoid possible future long grabbing and deforestation. As these areas are currently still mainly covered by forest. So this is the conclusion. I hope I am still in time. Setting up multi-disciplinary research programs, assessing grading, physiology, eco-physiology, technology, climatology, bio-climatology and socioeconomics, appear as a priority to guarantee the sustainability of the natural rubber supply chain in this context of global climate change in order to fill the numerous knowledge gaps and improve the downscaling reliability of the forecast at the local and regional levels, to adapt the GIPs to the new growing conditions, technical packages, to generalize the adoption of the climate-smart agriculture concept for climate change adaptation and mitigation, and to orient decision-making and planting policies on scientifically-sounding criteria. Together with the overall global challenge of natural rubber, which is the labor shortage risk, it should be the absolute priority for all the agronomy and physiology research programs on rubber for the next decades. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much, Eric. Really, I love listening to your talk. Well, I think I will reserve my comments for the Q&A session. I will immediately go and call upon Philippe Taylor. Philippe, you may now share your slides and go ahead, please. Okay, can you hear me? I have a comment with some sound. You will be giving the talk by Eric. Okay, you can hear me now? Yep, fine. Okay, thank you. Can you see the slide? Yes, I don't hear you. Okay, so I'm going to present something that is complementary to what has been shown before, because it's really the direct effect of climate change and mostly temperature change on the rubber tree eco-physiology, the functioning of the tree. So this is a rock command to the same team as before, plus Federico from IRD. So what do we know about the impact of climate change on rubber tree functioning? Actually, we know very little, almost nothing. If we talk about rubber eco-physiology and future climate, we need to know first what will the climate be in the main producing areas. And for this, we can see that we have information, as Dr. James have shown, but not enough, and I will detail why later. Then at the tree level, what will be the effects of higher temperature directly on carbon assimilation, because carbon assimilation is the base of tree growth and of course of rubber yield, because rubber is made mostly of carbon. And for this, we have very little information about the direct effect of temperature on carbon assimilation at the tree level. Then what will be the effects of higher temperature on tree growth? We can have some information, but very little also on the direct processes. Also, Dr. James have shown that there was likely a negative effect of higher temperature on tree growth. And the same for latex production. Statistically, we know that higher temperature is likely to have a detrimental effect on latex production. But how does it work and why and how can we predict this effect? We really need to have more information about this kind of parameters. And finally, the adaptation of rubber twist water stress. As it has been shown before by Dr. James, and I think all the presentation later we'll talk about this also. We have some information, but still not enough to really know what will happen in the future. So about the main, the climate in the main producing areas, we know what the global climate will be. It's really rather well known that we have several climate scenarios that are likely. But what we need to know is really to downscale these climate changes to the local climate if in every natural rubber area. We have available methodologies which are now quite reliable and available. And in some areas, as Dr. James has shown and also this presentation, this, sorry, example of summer at ALB in 2014 in the Chichwongbanna area. We have some, for some areas, quite good prediction of the future change in climate and how this will affect rubber cultivation. For example, in Chichwongbanna, which is, as you know, the northern limit of rubber cultivation, the area favorable to rubber may expand. But we need to generalize this kind of studies or to update them because it has been done for some areas, for example in Thailand some years ago. But now we have better tools and we need really to apply these tools to each area with appropriate methodologies. Now if we go to the direct effect of temperature on carbon assimilation, we have some knowledge at leaf scale. We know you can see on this graph that the temperature has a direct effect on maximum assimilation rate at leaf level. And if you go over the optimal temperature, which is about 28, you have a decrease, which is quite sharp. And more interestingly, we have methodologies to calculate what we call the photosynthetic parameters, the parameters that will allow us to estimate the photosynthetic capacity in the future under different climate. From the current parameters, we will be able to calculate the future parameters in higher temperature. But this is at the leaf level. And if we want to really estimate what will happen on the whole tree or the whole plantation level, it's still a long way to go because we need to go from the leaf photosynthetic parameters to first take into consideration the stomatal conductance. And we know, as it has been shown before, that when the temperature increase, the vapor pressure deficit of the air increase, and this will very likely decrease the stomatal conductance. So decrease the gas exchange at the leaf level. And then we have to integrate this at the canopy and the plantation level. And you can see on the right-hand side picture that the climate condition, the microclimate for the different leaves in the canopy of a tree are very different. So we really need to integrate this at this level. And we also should take into consideration the effect of phenology. It's likely that the higher temperature could shorten the lifespan of the leaves. And this will have a strong impact on the carbon balance. So what can we do to move forward? We have two ways. First, we can use the data that we can get from flux towers, which measure actually the exchange of CO2 and water and energy at the canopy and the plot level. We have done this, for example, in Thailand, in Changshao. Together, we can set up university and the rubber authority of Thailand. And from this, we can measure the what we call the primary production. That's it. That is more or less the biomass accumulation. We can also measure over years the use of water. And we can calculate water use efficiency. And as we do this together with very accurate measurements of climate data, we can then use this to model, to model really the future behavior of trees using functional models that links the different functions of carbon assimilation, water exchange, water regulation and so on, at the tree level. And we can expand this at the plot level. And for example, we have a model that we have been using for different plantations like eucalypt that can simulate water flux and CO2 flux at the plot level. And we can do simulation under different scenarios. And another kind of model that will be presented, I think, tomorrow or this afternoon by Sergei Blagodatsky is the Lucia model, which is a more integrative model at the larger scale. And I think it's this study, climbing the mountain fast but smart, is the most developed published study that has been done so far. And that can yield some prediction about the future impact of climate change. However, the next step will be also once we will know what will be the carbon assimilation at the tree and the plot level to understand how this carbon will be shared between the growth, between the reserves, between the maintenance of the tree and of course between the yield and the regeneration of latex because we know that only share only a part of the carbon that is assimilated will be available for latex regeneration and we need to maintain the balance between growth, maintenance and latex yield. And one way that is very promising is to use stable carbon isotopes like we have done with certain CO2 trace the carbon from the photosynthesis to the latex. And we have done the first study about this last year, which was published this year and we show that a part of the carbon used for regeneration of latex come from reserves and a part come from more recent photosynthesis and this change with the season. So this will also change likely with the climate. So this kind of study combined with modeling is what we need to really understand what will be the direct impact of climate on yield and growth and total carbon assimilation. And the other direct effect of temperature on latex yield as Eric mentioned before of course that will likely impact the latex flow and we know that the latex flow is higher when the temperature is lower and maybe also a parameter that will be important to look at is day and night differences. For example this paper published by a team from China showed that this day and night difference in mean temperature may have a huge impact on latex yield and most predictions show that night temperature will increase more than day temperatures. And finally what will be really important regarding this topic is to have disciplinary research combining the effect of climate change and also the effect of tapping frequencies to take into account the shortage of manpower that is currently coming in and to see how we can combine low tapping frequencies with adapting to climate change. Regarding the adaptation for water stress as for example Dr Jacob has shown before we have more knowledge because there have been more than 40 years of studies of the adaptation of river to marginal areas and this marginality is mostly longer growth periods particularly in India and also in northeast Thailand. And what is interesting is that from a recent studies that we have done in Thailand with some partners there is an interesting chronic viability in the response to in the response to water stress and for example this graph shows that the trees who are able to grow the more in the dry conditions are those who invest the more in canopy during the rainy season. Actually they avoid the water stress by growing during the rainy season and by being much less active during the dry season. And also something that is very important to take into account is that we know that for the future climate we will really have to distinguish the different impact of growth. We have to distinguish soil growth and atmospheric growth. For example this graph shows if you look at the cycle that's the current evaporal transpiration by the trees the so sorry the potential and the measured one and we see that when the potential increase the current transpiration increase up to a certain limit above a certain limit the trees strongly regulate evaporal transpiration in a transpiration sorry even if there is water available in the soil. So it means that there is a strong regulation to limit the water loss and this is one reason why many models that we have currently overestimate the water use in the rubber plantations. So as a conclusion we have little knowledge on the direct effect of climate change on the rubber functioning. We know that there are potential risks of adverse effects of climate change on growth on survival of the young trees and also on yield and we need really to have intensive research on the large scale by many teams. So one really important topic is to improve the eco physiological functions that are used in integrative models to really be able to forecast the behavior of the trees in the future climate because so far in most available models the functions really describing the functioning of the trees are not detailed enough or without enough information. So thank you that is all. Oh thank you very much Philip it was really lovely to see your flux our data from church and shower which we took with a review sometime ago and your suggestions about how to have multidisciplinary research for a future research into impact of climate change. Now we will move on to Mr. Tajidini smile who will be talking on the impact of climate change on latex harvesting activities. Kindly share the slides please. Okay good afternoon everyone or good morning to some of you. Okay my name is Tajidini smile and this presentation is actually a joint effort by me and Dr. Eric Gohey from Sirat. So the title of our presentation is impact of climate change on latex harvesting. So the objectives of this presentation is to share some information based on field observations and experience on the impact of climate change on latex harvesting activities and rubber yield. Provide some practical solutions on how to deal and cope with the issues and problems faced by rubber tapers and plantation owners. These are the main climate change issues affecting latex harvesting. The first one is intensity and amount of rainfall. The time of rainfall the duration of rainfall. These are latex harvesting operations affected by climate change. The first one is time for commencement of tapping because when tapping comments actually it is decided by the condition of the rubber trees whether it is wet or dry. So when there is interference by rain the time of commencement of tapping has to be adjusted or changed. Climate change issues also affect latex stripping time. That is the latex stripping time is shortened when there is rain or when the duration of the tree is not good. Thirdly partial loss or total crop loss due to unexpected rain during or after tapping operation has completed and this is common in those days also but lately this type of problem has become more complex and more difficult to handle in the field. That takes collection time. This has also been disrupted or has to be adjusted due to the change in time of rain and also the duration of the rain. Total number of tapping days of course due to the unpredictable rainfall and due to the different intensity now in the rainfall pattern total number of tapping days seem to be less compared to past years. Simulation application, the time and frequency now has to be adjusted to suit the weather pattern and also lead because of the leaf disease situation in a few countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. The simulation application has to be adjusted to the condition and health of the canopy or the rubber leaves. Effect of disruptions on routine latex harvesting operations, again this is delay in commencement of tapping time due to occurrence of abnormal and unprecedented rain. Delay the latex collection time past midday when tapping commands late. Well this is not good in terms of latex yield. Shorter latex dripping time when tapping is comments late. Frequent partial or total crop loss when unexpected rainfall while tapping is still in progress or latex are still dripping into the cups. Reduction in the total number of normal tapping days due to rain interruptions. These are the more detailed issues that are facing the small holders or the tapers at the moment. Disruption of tapping activities by abnormal rainfall. The ideal time for rubber tapping to achieve good yield under normal climatic conditions in most countries is after 10 p.m. at 9 p.m. till around 9 a.m. on the following day or the following morning. However due to personal safety in some areas they're not safe and practical reasons most tapping operations including latex collection are carried out between 4 a.m. till 11 a.m. Now in the past tapers are able to set quite a standard and routine time for tapping and latex collection but at present this is no longer possible. A lot of adjustment in tapping time or tapping comments and latex collection has to be made to suit the weather condition. During the past few years tapping operations are often disrupted by unexpected early morning showers or seeing partial or total loss of crop. Tapers have to adjust their tapping and latex collection time to avoid or reduce crop loss due to sudden showers which are impossible to predict. Now this is a new problem in Southeast Asia countries natural rubber producing countries outbreak of leaf disease causing serious secondary leaf fall triggered by climate change. In early 2018 Indonesia and Malaysia experienced severe secondary leaf fall due to fungus attack on rubber leaves by odium, colletotricum and pestilotheopsis resulting from increased rainfall causing significant reduction in canopy density and unhealthy leaves and subsequently reduction of rubber yield. Subsequently in 2019 and 2020 India, Thailand and Sri Lanka also suffered similar bad experience. To date the total area affected by the secondary leaf fall in the 5 and R producing countries is estimated around 400,000 hectare okay this is a big area and this area can increase anytime. This is a secondary leaf fall in Palembang, South Sumatra. The photo on the left is good canopy in January of 2020 after revolution and normally this is a time when the yield pick up after the revolution with a new canopy but in March of 2020 there was an attack of pestilotheopsis and we get poor canopy like this and the yield drops. Now this is the rainfall and normal yield trend in South Sumatra. If you look at the graph on the rainfall and try to fit it with the distribution of yield of rubber from January to December you can see the pattern of yield is almost similar to the pattern of rainfall okay. This is due to the development of the canopy after revolution after the dry spell in July, August and then there's an increase, slow increase in yield up to December and normally in January to June we expect the optimum yield or the high productive months okay. This coincides with the distribution pattern of rainfall but what happened in 2020 the rainfall it was very high and there was very bad secondary leaf fall causing very low yield during these three months that is from March to May okay. This is an example of sorry canopy condition in Polau Belitung. Good canopy in January 2020 about 70 to 80 percent canopy density but from March onwards yield to the pestilotheopsis attack we lost a lot of leaves a lot of canopy and the leaves are no longer efficient in photosynthesis and other process producing the latex and you can see later the data the yield goes down okay. This normal yield in blue normal yield pattern in 2017 before pestilotheopsis okay. January increase in February further increase in March and then it only is really drops drops down in May June and July but what happened in this year in 2020 in January it was slightly higher than 2017 okay but it never ketchup because from February to March there was already attack of pestilotheopsis and the reduction in canopy caused severe reduction in yield and the yield does not go beyond much beyond 30 kilos per task per tapping in 2020 okay. This paper that's the second part of this presentation I pass over to Dr. Eric Gohey. Can you please continue Dr. Eric. Thank you. Thank you Pak. Can you can anybody hear me yes. Can you hear me yes. Yes okay so after just presented the effect of the high rainfall disruption on tapping I will focus now on the over aspect of climate change due to lengthened dry seasons combined with higher temperature and which will result in an increased contrast between season between the rainy season and the dry season. Can you shift to the next slide Pak. Yes lengthened dry seasons combined with higher temperature will result in increased contrast with between seasons and it will result in a decrease in growth during the immature period and therefore in a delayed opening time which will reduce the economic efficiency of plantations and will induce a delayed return on investment so for instance you have a generic graph there showing the opening edge in years after tapping as a function of the dry season length varying from zero to five months why zero to five months in fact in fact is because there is no example of a successful rubber cultivation when the dry season months are above five so no rubber planted in areas where you have six months dry and so the the duration of the immature phase can be doubled from 4.5 years and when you have absolutely no water stress for instance North Sumatra 4.5 to 5 years at opening to nine years old sometimes even 10 when the dry season length increases from zero to five months per year. Next slide the latex is a sitoplasm composed of about 60 percent of water so any factor limiting the water effect decrease in rainfall growth increased temperature resulting in a break of leaf transpiration by the tree will have direct depressive effect on the latex yield. It will immediately result in a drop in latex regeneration capability combined with increasing temperature and vpd leaf stomata closure will result in a blockage of all water transports and there will be a strong and negative interaction with efficiency of stimulation in case of reduced tapping frequencies. Next and for adaptation we will act on the on the GAPs so the annual tapping stop during wintering and dry month should be lengthened when the dry season length and severity are increased. Usually we recommend two or three weeks to of tapping stop under normal conditions when there is no water stress and when the conditions climate climate conditions are normal so we stop the tapping during the refrigeration time but we have to recommend up to three months week in extreme cases of water stress like is done in the northeast of thailand and this will also act on the reduction of intervals between stimulations in case of reduced tapping frequencies and so for more details you can refer to this paper on the effects of the different tapping risk period during wintering and summer month on dry riverbed yield in the northeast of thailand we evaluate it with Pisa Meshantumar in church and so the effect of global warming the latex flow after tapping and especially the duration of flow is linked to the internal togur pressure of the latex vessels this is the reason why all rubber planters tap at night or in the early morning when the daily temperature is the lowest and the latex togur pressure is the highest because of this negative relation between temperature and togur what will happen with the temperature rises by two or three degrees at the time of tapping the effect of those coming high temperatures or yields are actually unknown at the moment as the rubber tree has never been planted in such areas but nothing good a priori so there is urgent need for research and adaptation next and regarding the latex physiology suikdosansu overall increasing climatic stress due to increased temperature increased water stress will result in an increased susceptibility to oxidative stress of the latex systems there will be a decrease of scavenger molecules especially tiles and ascorbate contents the latex resulting in a decrease of membranes protection the lead will burst early increasing the risk of latex instability resulting latex early coagulation decreased duration of latex flow and therefore decrease of the yield and any disturbed water uptake may also result in tsc drc increase disturbing the latex flow so this is not very optimistic but we have to adapt thank you very much for your adaptation for your attention okay thank you very much Eric and that's the end of our presentation yes thank you very much Tajuddin and Dorek that is highly informative a lot of food for thought there and I'm sure we'll come back to the theme of climate change and tapping activity in the Q&A session thank you once again so let me now request our IRRDB plan protection license officer Eugen and Mia pardon me for my pronunciation you are going to talk on climate change effect of diseases and best outbreaks on rubber productivity you may kindly share your slides now please good morning and good afternoon to everybody my name is Wing and Mia from RI Vietnam and also I am the liaison officer of IRRDB plant rotation a specialty group today I would like to present presentation and title impact of climate change on disease and best outbreak on rubber tree this one is just a little bit different from the title you see in the agenda you know the climate change on our day is globally recognized fact and the changing climate not only influences the crop growth and development but also has great serious impact on the diversity and in the distribution incident reproduction growth development and phenology of disease and best and it is likely to alter stage and rates of development of the pathogen modify horse resistance and result in changes in the physiology of heart pathogen interaction and it is expected that the ranks of many insects diseases will expand or change and new combination of pests and disease may emerge when current natural ecosystem respond to enter temperature and precipitation profile and a plant design disease is the result of interaction among susceptible heart plant, virulent pathogen and the environment and the changes in any of the components of the disease triangle can dramatically affect the magnitude of the disease expression in a given auto system and it is not surprising that busy pattern have already changed and will continue to change in response to the effect of climate change on pathogen and heart. The weather parameters have an important role in the triggering and spreading pests and disease in natural rubber is imply that climate change will modify patient of the rubber disease and pest distribution it may increase or decrease the incidence of some disease and best by changing the condition that would trigger an outbreak. Almost all pests and disease know to affect natural rubber have been existing since long ago however some of them that were minor in nature have become major in nature only in nursery and occurring in major tree also and change in severity and patient of of Korean have also been noted and some super disease change their reality important such as oedium secondary leaf form, old LF, corinacephora leaf form, CLF that were more severe under climate change. Phytotera abnormal leaf form, DLF occur in the Europa planting area where this disease had not been recorded and recently an expected disease is a pastalotepsy form has occurred. On the oedium leaf form disease change in the rainfall increasing temperature mist and high humidity can increase the incidence of the disease and the oedium leaf form can reduce yield up to 45 percent. Oedium leaf form is a significant limiting factor for rubber to production areas especially in high humidity area and the occurrence of oedium leaf form is increasing rapidly. Climate change is one reason for this because it increase the possibility of climatic condition that allow for epidemic level of oedium leaf form outbreak. The favorable weather condition for corinacephora leaf form is started at humidity and high temperature from 26 to 36 degrees so corinacephora leaf form usually occur and develop when weather has rained under hot condition such as at the end of dry season and beginning of rainy season. In Vietnam corinacephora leaf form were first detected in 1999 and after 10 years it had broken all due to favorable weather condition and at that time more than 20,000 hectares were affected and now the weather condition affected by global climate change as warmer temperatures erratic rain is favorable condition for corinacephora leaf form recurrent. Nowadays see corinacephora leaf form had emerged in almost rubber glowing area in Vietnam and thus disease become one of the most threatening diseases of rubber in Vietnam now and future. And the climate change also is one of the factor that contributed to the outbreak of a new disease which was believed to be caused by no physical com and now could be due to better low TFC, coletary com and or some unknown fungi and the first outbreak of the disease was from Indonesia and Malaysia in 2020 and later it's become more severe in Indonesia, Malaysia and appeared in Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. At the end of 2019 the total infected area was about 520,000 hectares which Indonesia over 387,000 hectares Malaysia was nearly 10,000 hectares Thailand was 122,538 hectares and Sri Lanka was around 10,000 hectares and this disease severely affect the health of the rubber tree and the causing silken reduction in lotto yield. I think later we will have more information about the disease by the presentation from Mr. Judin and some other presenter from Indonesia. And another aspect, rubber tree was also attacked by a variety of pests, several pests that have a foul on rubber tree. However only some pests that could simply damage the tree, such as the mice, coughs of a fruit, spider mice, scary insect, bug feeding, caterpillar and mullibug. Although the pet incident on rubber tree is relatively low, it is also found to be on the rise because of warming temperature in recent years. In current climate change may alter the current scenario of diseases and pests on rubber tree and these changes will certainly have effect on productivity and therefore studying the impact of climate change on important plant disease and pests is essential to minimize yield and quality losses, having in the selection for strategy to work around problems. And interdisciplinary approach, preferably by international programs, must be adopted to assess the effect of climate change or diseases and pests on rubber tree. And the complexity of the process involved in their relationship requires communication between professionals in the various areas concerned. The next one is the finish of my presentation and thanks for your kind attention. Thank you very much. That was an interesting talk on how climate change and favorable weather conditions can have a direct impact on diseases of natural rubber. So now the floor is open. We will take a few questions from the panelists or from the attendees who would like to go first. Dathuk, would you like to initiate the discussion please? There is no, you don't receive any question, James, to respond. And we can hear you, yes. Yeah, I think this first session, we are looking at more on the effect of growth, you know, the initial presentation, because that one, the immaturity period is lengthened. For example, we have experience in certain parts of Vietnam where the trees maturity will go up to six, seven, or even eight years, you know, instead of the normal five and a half to six years. So that's one. And then in terms of the production of latex, tapping, obviously the tapping day is very important as what has been presented by Tajudin there. If you don't get the, you know, because of the rainfall, then the number of tipping days reduced. So what the Malaysian government is doing is during this very heavy monsoon, they provide some subsidy to the small holders because they cannot go out and tap. I think the experience in India, you have your rain guard, but during the heavy monsoon, then you have the incidence of your abnormal leaf fall. It's about to begin now, I suppose. Is it James, your monsoon season, and then you get your abnormal leaf fall phytophthora? Well, we live with phytophthora and some of our new clones, new generation clones have a reasonably good tolerance to phytophthora because these clones are fast growing and they have a heavy lot of canopy. These clones inverse lot of its carbon, they're carboning in the canopy. So even if we lose 10, 15 percentage of the canopy because of abnormal leaf fall caused by the fungus, our productivity will not be affected. Number one. Number two, if the season is really bad, there is repeated defoliation because of phytophthora or any other fungus, then we really have a problem. Therefore, as I was noting down in the chat box, developing genetic tolerance to diseases, we should be part of our agenda of developing climate resilient clones should be a major agenda because these days using even normal chemicals for plant protection measures is becoming increasingly difficult because of environmental concerns. And on top of that, spraying rubber plantations, particularly mature rubber plantations is a very, very expensive affair. May I comment on that James? Because I think you have raised a very important issue with regards to the breeding for disease resistance. I think you are aware of our international clone exchange program. In carrying out the trials, it involves some 49 clones. And from Mitchell and Sirat, we received some 12 clones and some have been distributed. And we are conducting the trials now because this is very important. They have spent a lot of money breeding clones resistant to South American lifelike, but the possibility of having also resistance to other diseases is there. But we need to test because the exchange program has not been fully implemented. So we are hoping that if countries cooperate, settle this, then we can start our clone trials in the different regions. And it's not only for the disease resistance, it's also for the wood. Because ultimately, we have been breeding now for greater density of the wood, which will go into the furniture industry. And obviously, now we are planting in the marginal areas, high altitude, and then drought prone areas. So the activities carried out by the RDB will assist the end up producing countries to select the desired clones. I think that's all that I need to say, Dr. James. Absolutely. I think the RDB deserves all an appreciation and congratulations for that great initiative of multinational clone exchange, including the, you know, about a dozen self tolerant clones that we got from through Sirat. Now that is there in most of our member institutes. That's a great initiative. And also, before that, we had the wild jamblasms also collected. And now we are planning to get more wild jamblasms maybe from Colombia or even from Brazil itself. That's great. So we have a large gene pool with us. So if you want to develop disease tolerant clones, what is the science? What is the technology that we have to go and develop climate resilient clones, including disease tolerant clones, temperature tolerant clones, relatively drought tolerant clones. We can't continue to rely on traditional breeding and selection because that is going to take anywhere like 25 years. A lot of field work, a lot of manpower equipment, it is terribly expensive. And we can't wait for 25 years because climate change and the adverse effects, we are now beginning to see. So how to cut the corners and go for, you know, and fast forward the business of developing genetically tolerant clones or genetically more capable clones they can capable of producing high yield. That is an important question the international natural number R and D fraternity will have to examine in my view. Mr. Tajati would you like to say anything more on that? Well you can end, you want to add on to that. If not, we will now shift the focus away from the diseases to, you know, the initial, the cardinal issues like, you know, extreme weather events becoming more and more powerful and more frequent, including, you know, prolonged drought conditions or unexpected rains. Unexpected rains as Mr. Tajati explained and also Eric explained, you know, it will have a direct impact on our tapping activity. Yes, yes. I think it is very important now that the breeding will have to seriously look into the disease resistance under heavy rainfall. Okay, focus on that because the heavy rainfall is the one that triggers the disease attack. And this is going to be, personally, I think it is going to be a prolonged issue, but it's not going to go off just like that. Okay, but in the question I read just now, there is a question on use of rain guard in those areas affected by heavy rain and loss of crop and loss of the pink days. Okay, now specifically in Malaysia and Indonesia, the rubber research institute have tried, you know, for the past maybe 20 years or more, introducing the rain guard to these molders. Okay, but our problem was mainly cost of the material, cost of fixing, the adhesive was not effective, and the type of rain we have may be different from the success areas like Sri Lanka, Vietnam and India, where they successfully used rain guard. Okay, so I think the research institute need to look back into this, look the R&D on the design of the rain guard, the material they should be using, the adhesive, and of course, finally the cost, the cost of fixing the cost of material. And again, another issue is you have to relocate the rain guard after one cycle. Okay, so in the areas where we tried to introduce this in Indonesia and Malaysia, this was the main problem. Okay, so it's very important for Indonesia and Malaysia to look into the rain guard issues to solve the loss of yield, loss of crop, loss of tapping days. I mean, rain guarding is a well proven technique because we had to live with prolonged monsoon for about four or five months. Therefore, this technique evolved and it is now a standard practice in small and large buildings. So rain guarding per se is not a challenge, but implementing rain guarding that can be logistic. Yes, that is a real problem. Now, other than that, climate change and tapping for latex production, latex harvesting, as Eric and Philip pointed out, as also I also mentioned that in my first talk, high temperature and prolonged drought period. That can have a direct impact because we know that VPD, which is a function of humidity and temperature, will have a direct bearing on the target potential of the latex theory cells. So when the VPD is very high, naturally, of the pitch temperature is very high and humidity is very low, air is very dry and warm. And if you do the tapping, you know, your latex flow will be inhibited. So that would be a direct and immediate effect. And that is how we all quantified this effect in our different countries. Yes, we have quantified. In the traditional areas, it can be for one degree rising temperature, roughly 10% reduction. But in the cold prone regions of northeast India, for one degree rising temperature, productivity does not go down. And I would extrapolate that too, you know, the sub-Himalayan conditions where rubber is being grown in China too, with one degree rising temperature may be useful, may be beneficial for productivity. Also, the ADS, congenial for growing rubber might be expanding thanks to regional climate warming in the now cold regions where rubber is being cultivated. Coming to one of the fundamental issues of the species migrating with the climate change. And therefore, we might see the natural rubber landscape of the world and our member countries, you know, first getting changed. We know that it's happening, not only for rubber. Most many tropical crops are now being increasingly cultivated in temperate or, you know, in the higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere, thanks to the warming conditions. Along with these species, these crop species, their pests and pathogens are also moving. So climate-induced migration of the species will not be limited to favorable or beneficial crops alone. Other crops are also moving. The point is actually, and again, Eric and Philip also said that, you know, this agro-climatic zoning, certain regions, you know, which are now warm and humid may become increasingly more difficult for our cultivation. We need to have a good estimate of this. In India, we are now in the process of doing this, agro-climatically mapping, including using remote sensing satellite-based data. I think there is a great need for agencies such as IRST, NRPC, IRRDB, and other, you know, organizations on the platform today to come together and make a realistic assessment about what are the potential changes in the natural rubber landscape in the next 20, 30, 40 years in relation to the various IPCC scenarios. One point about productivity, growth and productivity. Yes, if you have a prolonged dry period and a hot period, immaturity period will be prolonged. I think in one of the slides, it is shown that from 4.5 years, I perceive that it is in Indonesia, it can be doubled to nine years. And then imagine, already in India, it is seven years. You know, we don't want to prolong it to, you know, 10 years. Therefore, developing climate resilient clothes that can tolerate adverse climatic conditions and grow fast should be a prime objective, I believe. Anybody from the panel to come and please? Dr. James. James, I have a question for Eric, Dr. James. Yes, sir. Can you hear me? Can you hear me, James? Yes, please go ahead. You know, Eric showed a slide during the severe flood in South Thailand, and I think the trees were, you know, quite submerged. We had a similar experience years ago in the south of Johor, you know, and I just want to know from him, do the trees finally recover because the experience that we had, three to four days of flooding, this is the beauty of the rubber trees. They managed to recover fully. Is this the same observation that he made in Thailand, South Thailand, and maybe also India? You had a very bad flood also last year. Thank you. Eric, you want to comment on that? I have not precise data for this, but I never saw any mortality of rubber trees except when the flooding was prolonged for more than one month. So for a few days, even a few weeks of flooding, the tree recovered. No problem. The main problem is that during this time, set-tapping is totally interrupted. This occurs very often in South Thailand in September and October, and last year it was just terrible in Kerala. But the tree can recover, and the tree is quite. The problem of this is the repetition, especially in the flooding areas, the lowland areas during the immature stage, because this totally stops the growth, but for the mature areas, before the tree dies, because of flooding, it will, we will not see that. The trees, they won't die if the flooding is not too long, but they will shed leaves out of the normal season. And one issue is to know if they will shed leaves again in the normal season. So if they do this, they will shed leaves twice a year, and so they will use more resources to renew the canopy, and that will impact likely the yield. And so repeated flooding may have an impact on the tree, not survival, but tree growth and tree yield, for sure. And I would like also to comment about, sorry, I removed the camera, about what James said. We need sure to develop programs for breeding in the future to maybe try to cut the corners, as you see. But one lesson that we learned from the recent COVID emergence is that when we try to cut corners in science, we just go nowhere. All the researchers which try to cut corners to develop fast treatments need to really just loss of time. So we need to cut corners, but with precaution and to respect the basic rules of science. That's very, very important. And another comment is, apart from breeding, we really know also to forecast what would be the behavior of the trees that are currently planted, because all the farmers who have their plantation, they're not going to change easily from one crop to another or one clone to another. So there are huge areas in the rubber planting countries where the climate is changing and the farmers have their trees planted. So we really need to focus what will happen also to these currently planted areas for the next 10 years. Probably I'll add to what Phil was saying. I was looking at the distribution of annual yield across months. And we find that during the lean period, particularly in India, it is the dry season, the summer season, the relative share is becoming very small. In that case, I just wonder, why don't we skip tapping during the lean time so that you can save on the cost and give your giving rest to the trees? Because as Philip said, existing plantations cannot be converted to something else all of a sudden. So we have to live with these plants. We have to live with climate change. And we can't change the clone of the genetic materials suddenly. But what are the practices, economic practices, management practices? In a mature plantation, there is very little that you can do by way of degreasing growth by giving extra fertilizer. Irrigating mature rubber plantation is almost out of question. So tapping is one area where we can probably do some fine tuning in terms of the time of tapping. I know at least one major plantation company in India used to send the tapers to the field very early in the morning to be as early as three o'clock in the morning. Dr. James, may I get your permission to respond to one of the questions that is in the drop box? It's addressed to me. It's from Indonesia, I think. I can see something to do with intercropping and having a combination of crops being planted. I think that's the direction we are going. The only thing for the immature period is quite easy to have your intercrops. But the combination that you have to choose for crops or for plant species, for example, there are areas that they put in forest species combined with the rubber, then you have to decide on when you do your felling. That means the forest species will also fail at the same time to facilitate the replanting. So this is actually the area of the direction that we are going now, and the RDB promotes this. That means we have to go into the intercropping to supplement the income, especially for smallholders, where the maturity period might come after eight or nine years, so they need to have some income. So that is one direction that we are going. Then the other thing, even mixed cropping, mixed species, some they put fruit trees, but the only problem is you have to do your felling unless it's planted in the avenue, where you can still fail your rubber and the other species remain. So we have to find a very good mix farming system. Thank you very much. I just want to bring the attention, bring to the attention of the panelists two comments that are there towards the end of the chat box. One is from Malaysia and the other one is from India from Dr. Jacob Matthew. They both say that their mature rubber trees were flooded sometime in the past, but that did not affect the yield per se. I think we have seen in the last couple of last two years, we had flooding because of flooding, you can't go and do the tapping. And if there is excess rainfall also, you have difficulties in going and tapping, but and excess rainfall will definitely have a bearing on fight. But the direct effect of flooding on immediate yield doesn't seem to be very big, but the direct effect of a high temperature on yield is, all of our data clearly show that even carbon assimilation, growth rate, immediate flow rate, suppression in the daily yield that is there. I will also want to flag one, two comments made by Julio Alger, pardon me if my pronunciation is correct, from Peru. One comment is why not we have agroforestry system based on rubber in Peru. And another comment by the same person is what will be your recommendation for countries in the Amazon where we have original rubber species and the forest to start plantations in degraded humid tropics areas. Harry, you want to comment on that? For that look, you want to comment? I guess you see those questions or comments in the chat box. In India, we are in the process of developing rubber based agroforestry systems because our average size is only about an acre, 0.5 hectare. And the viability of almost a million small holdings with mean area of 0.5 hectare is becoming a matter of serious concern, both from the point of production of rubber as well as the survival of the small farmers. Therefore, how best we can incorporate other species, particularly agroforestry systems or fruits and vegetables is a major area of agronomic research in India. So, Julio, I share your views, I share the same sentiments, but for historical reasons, rubber always had been grown as a monoculture, large estate crop, now it is a small holder crop, but rubber agronomy is fast evolving. Dr. James, can I respond to two issues raised just now? Please. Okay, number one is regarding rest tapping during the low yield or during the dry period. So we have introduced this system to rest during the low yield, especially for plantation because it is not under the low rubber price now, the current low rubber price, it is not economical to tap. In fact, the plantation owner has got to subsidize if the yield is below 12 kg per task per tapping, under the current low rubber price in some parts of Indonesia. So it is now being practiced. In fact, I have discussed with a few plantations that they are going to implement rest tapping starting July, August. Okay, we have tried, I've tried so far, I've only managed to convince only one plantation to start the last four years and happy to report that after the tapping is rested, the yield when this recommence tapping in October, November, December, there is a surge in yield after the rest tapping. In fact, they make back, they make back more than what they lost if they continue tapping at the high cost of production. Okay, so we hope to get more people to go into this. In fact, I have two plantations by July, August, they are going to stop tapping because the rubber price has not improved and they are going to start resting July, August. Okay, number one, number two is agroforestry system. Okay, there is quite abundant data on mixed cropping, integrated farming, and also different species including planting herbs together with rubber. Okay, so the publications are there at the Rubberson Institute of Malaysia or Malaysian Rubber Board now. So those interested, you can write to Malaysian Rubber Board or go to their website and try to get those articles. They are quite extensive there and also Indonesia has done quite a bit of work on intercropping rubber with various food crops and also herbs. Okay, these are the two I want to add. Thank you. In most of those studies, we have seen that the productivity of rubber was not up to the market. So we don't want to compromise rubber production market, but at the same time, we want to incorporate other crops into the system, which calls for drastic changes in the way we looked at rubber agronomy including spacing. Including spacing because that is something that we have not visited in the last 50 years. So we still believe in the rectangular or in the traditional square planting pattern keeping about 500 trees per hectare, 500 to 550 per hectare. But how best the planting design can be altered in such a way that total rubber production from one hectare is not affected markedly, but at the same time, we are releasing more space, more land for bringing in more crops, which can intercept light and utilize the nutrient from the soil. That is something that probably rubber agronomies should look into. Coming back to Eric, Philip and myself, Petri, come from similar streams of physiology. I'm a small grower and last one year, I did not tap and I found for different reasons. And I found that the biomass has gone up and when I received the tapping during this season, I'm getting good yield, much better yield than what I would have normally caught. So not tapping at free, so that will reduce our supply. But that carbon is being used to put on more biomass, which will eventually result in producing more land. Therefore, leaving the tree ideal during the lean season may have a sensible physiological meaning at least to experiment with. That way, you will reduce the cost of production also. At the same time, you are giving opportunity for the tree to put more biomass. Any comments? Yes, absolutely. Any tapping or rest will result in an accumulation of reserves, which can be used afterwards. And as you increase the growth, in fact, for the same harvest index, you get afterwards more latex. Absolutely. It's except that Dr. James, you're not the average rubber planter, so you can not tap your trees and have income from another way. So that's the issue for the small orders who are really depending on the day-to-day production of latex. But it's sure that the way forward will likely be to have people who are doing rubber part-time and who will have other activities that can be on farm, but also out farm. Maybe like working in factory during the week and tapping the trees during the weekend. That could be one of the ways that the sector is going to move too. Just one more comment regarding the tapping stop. The tapping stop is a commonly used, for instance, practice in the marginal areas. If you look at ISAN, usually they stop the tapping in January to restart it only on the 15th of April or even 1st of May. In fact, if you conduct experiments without tapping stop or with different tapping stop durations, you notice that the annual total yield is not modified. So in fact, it means that the productivity of each tapping during the rainy season is much better when you conduct a tapping stop. That's why you do that. So the adaptation is there on the recommendation of the accurate length of this tapping stop. For instance, in Yunnan, in China, in South China, tapping is stopped almost for four months in a year, from 15 November to mid-April. Why? Because the dry season there and the wintering season coincides with also cold month, which are very dangerous because the coagulation doesn't stop. In fact, it can produce two tons there by tapping only eight months in a year. So any tapping stop, say when it is correctly managed and associated to suitable physiological background, is beneficial for the latex productivity at each tapping and can be recovered. I think we have overshot by more than 10 minutes now and we have been advised to to break now from the host. So just to wrap up, I think we had a very useful interaction. A lot of R&D has happened in the field of climate change and evolving climate resilient agronomic practices, climate resilient clones, climate and tapping, climate and the sun diseases. I think the efforts that we had taken in IRRDB and other places in the last 10, 15 years have really gave us good dividends. At least we have some baseline information as to what climate change is all about in the in our growing countries of the world. Now to conclude, see we are now going through a very bad time throughout the world because of the COVID and the supply chain disruptions, the lockdowns, life is terrible in many parts of the world. Economy is taking a big beating almost in every country. How do we relate this to climate change? I mean, I'm not saying that the COVID-19 is with the climate change but the after effects of COVID-19, I would like to see as a harbinger of things to come in the coming years or coming decades because of climate change. Imagine how climate change might impact Southeast Asian countries and how that can seriously derail the production and supply chain of natural rubber. It will have serious implications for livelihood of millions of people in this highly popular region and it will have serious implications for the rubber industry, global rubber industry and there cannot be a lockdown to escape from climate change. I think we will consolidate the discussions here and we will then give a list of recommendations and major findings from the five presentations. I thank all the panelists, all the speakers and all the participants and also the organizers and hand over the program to the organizers. Thank you very much.