Climate Change Transforming Europe's Agriculture, Report Finds

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Climate change is shift­ing the estab­lished pat­tern of cul­ti­va­tions in Europe, favor­ing the north­ern coun­tries over the south­ern, the German broad­caster Deutsche Welle (DW) said in a report.

Warmer weather is mak­ing its way to the north decreas­ing the frost peri­ods and increas­ing grow­ing sea­sons, while weather con­di­tions resem­bling trop­i­cal cli­mates are shap­ing in the south bring­ing more prob­lems to the agri­cul­tural sec­tor.

Northern have started to cap­i­tal­ize on the trend by grow­ing typ­i­cal crops of the south. Orchards of apri­cots and nec­tarines have already appeared in the state of Lower Saxony in north­ern Germany, and vine­yards con­tin­u­ously expand in size in coun­tries like Denmark and Sweden.

In the U.K., the coun­try’s wine indus­try has quadru­pled its pro­duc­tion dur­ing the last 20 years cash­ing in on a milder cli­mate, although with the price of fac­ing extreme weather phe­nom­ena more often.

“Unpredictable weather events, droughts and intense sum­mer storms are a real prob­lem and seem to have increased in fre­quency,” said Jon Fletcher, a wine pro­ducer based in the U.K. ​“This year we have already had the sun­ni­est May on record and no rain­fall for two months, so the unpre­dictable weather con­tin­ues.”

Traditional crops of the south, on the other hand, have begun to suf­fer sig­nif­i­cant losses under the increas­ingly trop­i­cal-like cli­mate of the Southern European coun­tries.

“Climate change is pos­ing a risk for the sus­tain­abil­ity of vine­yard man­age­ment at a global scale and, par­tic­u­larly, in Europe,” said Josep Maria Sole of VISCA, an EU-funded project for help­ing wine pro­duc­ers in Europe adapt to new chal­lenges. He added that intense heat and droughts will pose a seri­ous threat to Europe’s wine indus­try in the com­ing years.

Αdverse weather is a men­ace for the olive oil sec­tor as well. Italy lost more than half of its 2018 har­vest due to colder than usual weather, with an accu­mu­lated finan­cial loss of approx­i­mately €1 bil­lion ($1.19 bil­lion), DW said in its report.

This fall, rough weather of heavy rains and hail­storms around the coun­try has already taken a toll on olive trees among other crops.

In advance, pathogens like the fruit fly take advan­tage of the warmer win­ters to invade new ter­ri­to­ries, threat­en­ing the olive oil indus­try of Europe, explained Blaz Kurnik, an expert on cli­mate change at the European Environment Agency (EEA).

“In the worst-case sce­nario, up to 80 per­cent of [Italy’s] olive trees will be affected by this every year,” Kurnik noted.

Some farm­ers around the Mediterranean have opted for trop­i­cal species instead of indige­nous crops, espe­cially in Italy where orchards of avo­ca­dos and papaya spring up in tra­di­tional olive oil mak­ing ter­ri­to­ries like Sicily, Puglia and Calabria.

“The favor­able cli­mate of many areas in the Mediterranean basin is pro­mot­ing trop­i­cal fruit cul­ti­va­tions,” Vittorio Farina, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of agri­cul­ture at the University of Palermo, said. ​“In fact, the pre­dom­i­nant mango and avo­cado pro­duc­tion is con­cen­trated in trop­i­cal coun­tries, but recently its cul­ti­va­tion has spread out­side the tra­di­tional geo­graph­i­cal regions to the Mediterranean basin and in par­tic­u­lar in Egypt, Israel, South Africa, Europe, mainly Spain and Italy.”

In Spain, how­ever, sci­en­tists focus more on adapt­ing the exist­ing vari­eties to the alter­ing weather than intro­duc­ing new kinds of crops.

“There already is the pos­si­bil­ity to adapt the vari­ety with­out chang­ing the [main] crop in the short to medium term,” Margarita Ruiz-Ramos, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, said. ​“It’s a com­pro­mise between dif­fer­ent needs. And that’s why it’s not so obvi­ous as to just bring in some African crops.”

• Deutsche Welle