Enhanced weathering in China’s acidic rice fields offers potential agronomic co-benefits

China faces the converging challenges of farmland soil acidification, securing food security, and meeting carbon neutrality goals. Enhanced weathering (EW) offers a promising scalable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) pathway that can also deliver valuable agronomic benefits, but its potential for soil pH management, crop yield increases, and CDR in Chinese croplands is poorly constrained. Here, we develop a modeling framework to simulate co-benefits of basalt-based EW in acidic rice fields in China and conduct a spatially explicit national assessment. Focusing on the expected benefits from soil deacidification based on previous empirical data, EW can enhance relative rice yield by 4.61 ± 2.45% to 6.34 ± 3.98% by increasing mean soil pH by 0.68–1.02 units, resulting in a preliminary economic gain of USD 3.56 billion annually. This process also has the potential to simultaneously sequester 204.39 Mt CO2 over 35 years based on strategic applications of an additional 50 t basalt ha-1 every ten years for fields where soil pH remains below 6.5. We find that the yield benefits alone would provide a gross agricultural revenue of USD 609 per tonne of gross CO2 sequestered. Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi, and Guangdong persistently show the greatest co-benefits and should be prioritized as areas of early deployment. Our findings identify targeted EW deployment in China’s acidic rice fields as a promising strategy to improve soil quality and support rice production, while potentially contributing to national CDR targets.