Influenced by human activities, the global climate is becoming warmer and warmer. The continuous increase of the earth surface temperature has a far-reaching impact on rice production. This paper summarized the effects of climate warming on rice growing areas and yield, the effects of high temperature damage on rice growth and development, the progress on rice heat-tolerance genetic improvement. The results are as follows: The climate warming increased the active accumulated temperature, extended the rice growth season, and made the north boundary of rice growing region move northward, which is favorable for increasing the rice planting area. The climate warming also resulted in the frequent occurrence of high temperature stress, the high temperature stress could induce serious spikelet sterility at booting and flowering stage and poor grain plumpness at filling stage, which resulted in rice yield and quality decline. A number of heat-tolerant rice germplasms have been identified, and some QTLs related to heat-tolerance were also identified from these genetic resources. Planting heat-tolerant rice is one of the most effective ways of alleviating heat damage on rice, the way of proper screening methods and crossbreeding with heat-tolerant rice as parents is appropriate for developing new heat-tolerant rice varieties.