Diversity buffers winegrowing regions from climate change losses
Morales-Castilla I, Garcia de Cortazar-Atauri I, Cook BI, Lacombe T, Parker A, van Leeuwen C, Nicholas KA, Wolkovich EM. 2020. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 6p
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906731117
Abstract
Agrobiodiversity—the variation within agricultural plants, animals, and practices—is often suggested as a way to mitigatethe negative impacts of climate change on crops [S. A. Woodet al.,Trends Ecol. Evol.30, 531–539 (2015)]. Recently, increasing research and attention has focused on exploiting the intraspecific genetic variation within a crop [Hajjaret al.,Agric. Ecosyst. Envi-ron.123, 261–270 (2008)], despite few relevant tests of how this diversity modifies agricultural forecasts. Here, we quantify howi ntraspecific diversity, via cultivars, changes global projections of growing areas. We focus on a crop that spans diverse climates, has the necessary records, and is clearly impacted by climate change: winegrapes (predominantly Vitis vinifera subspeciesvinifera). We draw on long-term French records to extrapolate globally for 11 cultivars (varieties) with high diversity in a key trait for climate change adaptation—phenology. We compared scenarios where growers shift to more climatically suitable cultivars as the climate warms or do not change cultivars. We find that cultivar diversity more than halved projected losses of current winegrowing areas under a 2◦C warming scenario, decreasing areas lost from 56 to 24%. These benefits are more muted at higher warming scenarios, reducing areas lost by a third at 4◦C (85% versus58%). Our results support the potential of in situ shifting of cultivars to adapt agriculture to climate change—including in major winegrowing regions—as long as efforts to avoid higher warming scenarios are successful.
Published: 10/02/2020