Co-designed agro-climate indicators identify different future climate effects for grape and olive across Europe

Abstract

Co-design processes involving the scientific community, practitioners, end users and stakeholders can efficiently characterize harmful weather events during the growing season that potentially result in losses of crop yield and quality. This study builds on the experience of the EU Horizon 2020 project MED-GOLD for grape and olive. The identified agro-climate indicators are extended from the MED-GOLD regions to the entire ones where grape and olive are currently grown in Europe and Turkey, and used to assess climate change impacts with intrinsic adaptation relevance stemming from the co-design process. Before 2000, only a low fraction of the European grape and olive growing areas was exposed to extreme weather events as revealed by the agro-climate indicators, but this has changed rapidly afterward. Projections show increasingly widespread extreme high temperature events from 2020 to 2080. Approximately one-third of grapevine regions and over half of olive cultivation areas are expected to experience extreme drought conditions. Additionally, the frequency of compound extreme events will increase in the future, especially in the Mediterranean region and under the high-end emission scenario RCP8.5. This outcome calls for a new decision-making mindset that embeds expected levels of climate variability and extremes as the “new normal” for grape and olive in Europe. This will facilitate deployment of the required biophysical, economic and policy adaptation tools.