SUSTAINABLE VITICULTURE – CHALLENGES IN FRONT OFCLIMATE CHANGE

Schultz, H.R.

Forschungsanstalt Geisenheim,von Lade Str. 1 D-65366 Geisenheim, Germany, h.schultz@fa-gm.de

INTRODUCTION

The primary challenge for the future wine industry world wide will be climate change,because the direct (temperature, precipitation, CO

concentration etc.) and indirectconsequences (resource management, energy efficiency, sustainability in production andconsumer acceptance etc.) will affect all facets of the wine industry. The predicteddevelopments in climate are region-specific and adaptation to ensure a sustainable productionchain can only be successful considering the regional characteristics with its diverse technical,environmental, economic and social implications. Europe for example, where still most of theworld’s grape production for wine is located, is extremely heterogeneous in all thesecharacteristics, and the structure of the wine industry, which is still largely smaller scale, ascompared to the “New World”, will hamper fast changes and flexible responses to thechallenges lying ahead. Additionally, the notion of “tradition” is deeply anchored in theEuropean wine world, and tradition and change are not very compatible concepts. Mostregions in Europe are concerned with respect to the future of “typicity” of their products,since in many cases, the balance between vineyard site, climate, soil, variety and the appliedcultivation measures, sometimes evolved over centuries, will be perturbed or even disrupted.In this context sustainability should not be mistaken with protecting or preserving what ispresent but rather be defined as a continuous process of adaptation to future developments inline with environmental needs, economically viable and socially compatible. The wineindustry needs to develop concepts for the efficient management of resources under a widevariety of cultivation and production conditions to maintain sustainability. If these problemsare not solved, certain areas, where grapes are the sole agricultural commodity, will facesubstantial socio-economic problems in the future.In general, the rapidly increasing world population and the scarcity of suitable land foragricultural food production and the confrontation with a changing climate will ultimately putpressure on grape producing areas for the use of land and the input of resources. For mostgrape producing areas the predicted developments in climate will be identical to becomingmore marginal for quality production and to be forced to improve resource management. Thiswill have pronounced impacts on production methods.Several major challenges can be identified:1.

risk assessment for grape growing regions2.

adaptation potential of grape production systems3.

the CO

problem4.

Nitrous oxide, methane and the carbon budget of vineyards5.

resource management from the vineyard to the customer

1. RISK ASSESSMENT

Any strategy for the mitigation of climate impacts and the resulting recommendation foradaptive measures need an assessment of the risks on a temporary and spatial scale. For

2example, the biggest challenge within the context of global warming lying ahead for manywine growing areas of the world will be the availability of water. Predictions of the totalannual amount of precipitation and its annual and regional distribution are uncertain (IPCC2008). However, according to many experts, water and its availability and quality will be themain pressures on, and issues for, societies and the environment (IPCC 2008). Due to risingtemperatures and solar radiation in many places, and decreasing and/or more irregularprecipitation patterns, climate change will exacerbate soil degradation and desertification(IPCC 2008). Desertification is often accompanied by soil salinization which today affects7% of the global total land area and 20-50% of the global irrigated farmland (IPCC 2008).Irrigation in agriculture already accounts for about 70% of the total water use worldwide andthe irrigated surface area has increased linearly since 1960. Driven by apparent changes in theclimate conditions in viticultural areas previously entirely rain-fed, there is already anincreasing interest in irrigation. However, population growth is predicted to reach between 8.7billion (by 2050) in the most conservative estimation to about 15 billion (by 2100) in a A2“worst case” scenario (IPCC baseline scenarios 2007). This will cause a general increase inwater demand on a global scale, forecast to become a problem for agricultural water use inlight of sharp increases in water consumption of the urban, industrial and environmentalsectors (Fereres and Soriano 2007). Some fresh water basins in the world termed “water-stressed “ by the IPCC (2008), that is water availability decreases below 1000 m

capital

-1

or withdrawal to average run-off increases above a ratio of 0.4, are partly congruent to areaswhere grapes are currently cultivated on a larger scale (example, the Murray-Darling Riverbasin in Australia). These developments will put enormous pressure on irrigated land notdirectly devoted to food production with the combined consequences (temperature and water)that grape cultivation will be partly displaced from traditional areas (Schultz and Jones 2008)and will be forced to use more marginal land under environmental conditions previouslytermed less suitable. Risk assessment in terms of water availability and management needs tobe applied to each individual region. For example, the average of all applied climate modelsin the IPCC 2007 study predict an increase in precipitation rates during winter over

Central

Europe

, with a decrease in summer. For

Southern Europe

California

and

WesternAustralia

, however, winter precipitation rates are likely to decrease which may substantiallyreduce water resources to be used in summer for human-, industrial and agriculturalconsumption (Cubash et al., 2001 in Houghton et al., 2001, IPCC 2007). Of all land masseson earth, simulations show, that summer drying will be most dominant over

Western andSouthern Europe, Northern Africa, South Africa and Western Australia.

Within theselarger regions, we need to use plant or commodity models capable of simulating plant andproduction system water use and feed these models with regionalized climate scenarios inorder to evaluate possible changes and

risks

and to deduct mitigation and adaptationpractices. Figure 1 shows examples where 3 climate models were coupled to a vineyard waterbalance model (Lebon et al. 2003) to estimate changes in the length of drought periods for 2steep slope vineyard sites in a temperate climate (530 mm annual precipitation rate) locatedclose to Geisenheim, Germany, 50 °North. The models used were STAR II, a statistical modeldeveloped by the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact (PIK, Orlowsky et al. 2008);WETTREG/ECHAM 5, a statistical model based on the ECHAM 5 simulator of the Max-Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg (Spekat et al. 2007), one of the models used inthe IPCC (2007) assessment report, and CLM, a dynamic model based on weather forecastingsystems by the German Weather Service (Keuler et al. 2009). Free available soil water of thetested vineyards was 75mm (site 1, Rüdesheim) and 175mm (site 2, Johannisberg),respectively over the rooting depth, and slopes were 76% and 36%, respectively (Hofmannand Schultz 2010). Irrespective of the models and scenarios used, there is a clear increase in

3the risk of extended drought periods (water stress was defined as a pre-dawn water potentialbelow – 0.6 MPa) for site 1, but only small changes for site 2. From results such as thesemitigation strategies can be deducted such as planning an irrigation system and/or waterreservoir for the first site.Fig. 1: Risk assessment of drought stress for 2 vineyard sites located close to Geisenheim,Germany for the future. The analysis was performed with a vineyard water balance modelusing climate simulation data from several different regionalized climate models (Star II.Wettreg, CLM) and climate scenarios (A1B, A2 dry, B1 moist). Left; dry site with 75mmplant available water, right; vineyard site with 175mm plant available water (Hofmann andSchultz 2010).

2. ADAPTATION POTENTIAL OF GRAPE PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

There is a large spectrum of adaptive measures which can be used in Viticulture in light of climate change and only some will be cited here. The most frequently recommended is achange in grapevine variety, based on differences in temperature requirements for theircultivation (Jones et al. 2005). The problem with this aspect is on the one side traditionprecluding a rapid change in areas which have drawn their reputation from a reduced numberof varieties (i.e. Burgundy, Bordeaux a.s.o), and on the other side the fact, that we only knowthe minimum temperature requirements but in most cases not the maximum tolerabletemperature. An additional, so far underrated factor in the context of sustainability are diseasetolerant varieties, which have been developed over several decades (for instance in Germanyand Switzerland), have achieved high quality standards but in some cases can not be usedbecause of legal reasons or have not been widely accepted because of their names not beingthat of a “classical” variety. However, in the sense of a sustainable practice, less input of resources a.s.o. and less use of fungicides, this existing genetic diversity needs to beimplemented in long-term strategies.There are numerous other adaptive measures which can be applied based on regionalpredictions with respect to climate change. Rootstock choice would be one of them, using