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Maruf Mallick 
bdnews24.com environment correspondent 

Dhaka, June 5 (bdnews24.com)—With the global temperature gradually on the rise, Bangladesh being a tropical delta has also been experiencing comparatively higher humidity and temperature through the past couple of decades, threatening agriculture, climatologists have observed.  The country's average temperature recorded an increase of 1 degree centigrade in the past 30 years, which, if continued, may cut the boro harvest per acre by 20 to 50 percent towards 2050, a study of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology said.  "To determine the possible impact of climate change trends on our agriculture in the 2030s, 2050s and 2070s, we researched with the climate data on precipitation, temperature and sunlight collected from SAARC Meteorological Research Centre," professor M Ashraf Ali of BUET civil engineering department, the guide of the study, told bdnews24.com.  He said temperature changes will very much affect the cropping patterns. For example, the yield of the boro varieties now cultivated will be slashed by 20-50 percent due to higher temperatures.  The north-western region will be specially affected, he said and added sowing a bit earlier might save losses to a minimum though.  Ali said salinity-tolerant paddy species have been developed by Bangladeshi scientists. Bangladesh Rice Research Institute is working on species which will grow withstanding increasing temperatures too.  Dr Nazrul Islam, head of synoptic division of SMRC, told bdnews24.com that Bangladesh would have to adopt region-specific planning to cope with the climate change menaces, because some regions might suffer from drought whereas zones may experience heavier rainfalls resulting in flash floods.  The mean temperatures or other values will not be good to work with just at any place. The innovations instead have to be locale specific.  The years 2013 and 2014, for example, will experience less rainfall on average, Islam said. Again, 2018 will have five percent more precipitation, the future scenarios indicate.  Dr Jiban Krishna Biswas, another BRRI scientist, told bdnews24.com that the agricultural scientists have been working on developing crop varieties to suit the changing climate.