A planning workshop which brought together regional and international scientists to review the current state and to develop a collaborative research programme whereby new and existing agronomic data and rice-wheat cropping system models could be better utilised to determine so the likely effects of climate change variability and investigate management strategies to improve the productivity and sustainability of the system. The workshop concluded that the main areas for future development include geo-referenced data management; cropping system model development; scientific capacity building for model use and interpretation; and developing client-oriented applications. The modelling needs to be closely coupled with field experimentation.