Considering the mean global temperature increase of 0.7°C from the start of the industrial era and the prediction window of additional increase of 1 to 3.7°C by the end of the century, adaptation through crop improvement and adjustment of cultural practices is essential. One way of achieving this challenge is to better take into account the plant response to temperature into crop models. In the case of rice, mostly grown in tropical and subtropical regions, the increase in temperature goes with systematic yield reduction which makes this challenge even more critical. Two main situations need to be analyzed: the impact of (i) daytime heat on spikelet sterility and (ii) nighttime temperature on respiration. (i) Coping with heat stress at day time involves different options that account for the ability of plants to escape (early anthesis time), avoid (panicle cooling through transpiration) or tolerate (presence of key genes) heat at flowering. First, variability in the time of day of anthesis was correlated with the mean of climatic variables calculated for the 7-day period before flowering, over four distinct field locations and seasons and four contrasted varieties. The best predictive variables (negative correlations) were Tmin and VPD, with high values of both being associated with early times. Second, depending on conditions, panicle temperature varied between 9°C below and 2°C above air temperature at 2 m. A significant positive correlation was obtained between spikelet sterility rate and maximum panicle temperature at flowering, whereas no correlation was obtained with air temperature. By extrapolation, this correlation predicted minimal sterility with a panicle temperature of 30 °C, and 50 % sterility with a panicle temperature of 33-34 °C. Third, a genome-wide association study of the sterility rate of 167 traditional and modern varieties (grown for six consecutive days at 37°C between 8 am and 2 pm at anthesis) detected 91 significant associations grouped int