Cape Town - Climate change will, by 2050, have dramatically shrunk some of the world’s most famous wine-producing regions, including the Bordeaux and Rhône valleys in France and Tuscany in Italy, by as much as 73 percent.
The Western Cape’s wine region will shrink by an estimated 51 percent by mid-century.
However, the wine-producing potential of other regions will rise significantly as the climate changes, pushing vineyard production into cooler higher latitudes – in particular in New Zealand (168 percent) and western parts of North America (231 percent).
But this will in turn probably have major conservation implications, both because of new land use competition – existing natural habitat will be targeted for new vineyards, affecting in the northern hemisphere animals like pandas, other bears, deer and elk – and because of a projected increase in water use for irrigation and to keep grapes cool, as temperatures rise.
These are among the key findings of a major study by a team of scientists from six universities and conservation groups in the first world-wide analysis of its kind.
Their paper, “Climate Change, Wine and Conservation”, was published this week in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers created the first global map of future wine-making and looked in detail at nine areas: California, western North America, Chile, Mediterranean Europe, Northern Europe, South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region (fynbos), parts of Australia with Mediterranean climate, parts of Australia with non-Mediterranean climate, and New Zealand.
“The results surprised even us,” said project leader Dr Lee Hannah, senior scientist for climate change biology in Conservation International’s Moore Center for Ecosystem Science and Economics. “Climate change is going to move potential wine-producing regions all over the map. These global changes put the squeeze on wildlife and nature’s capacity to sustain human life in some surprising places.
“Consumer awareness, industry and conservation actions are all needed to help keep high-quality wine flowing without unintended consequences for nature and the flows of goods and services it provides people. This is just the tip of the iceberg – the same will be true for many other crops.”
Co-author Dr Rebecca Shaw said climate change would set up future competition for land between agricultural and wildlife. “This could have disastrous results for wildlife (but), fortunately, there are proactive solutions. We are creating incentive-based programmes with private landowners to provide wildlife habitat.”
One such programme is the Biodiversity & Wine Initiative, a partnership between the South African wine industry and the conservation sector led by WWF-SA. - Cape Argus