Viticulture extension in response to global climate change drivers - lessons from the past and future projections

Abstract

The potential areal extent of agricultural crops is sensitive to climate change and its underlying drivers. To distinguish between the drivers of past variations in the Mediterranean viticulture since Early Antiquity and improve projections for the future, we propose an original attribution method based on an emulation of coupled climate and ecosystem models. The emulator connects the potential productivity of grapevines to global climate drivers, notably orbital parameters, solar and volcanic activities, demography and greenhouse gas concentrations. We found that variations in potential area for viticulture during the last three millennia in the Mediterranean Basin were mainly due to volcanic activity, while the effect of solar activity and orbital changes were negligible. In the future, as expected, the dominating factor is the increase in greenhouse gases, causing significantly drier conditions and thus major difficulties for viticulture in Spain and North Africa. These constraints will concern significant areas of the Southern Mediterranean Basin when global warming exceeds +2°C above pre-industrial conditions. Our experiments showed that even an intense volcanic activity comparable to that of the Samalas - sometimes considered as the starting point of the Little Ice Age at the mid 13th century - would not slow down this decline in viticulture yield in the southern margin of the Mediterranean area.