Forum for the Future report: Check-out carbon

Forum for the Future has published a new report the explores the potential of carbon labelling. It concludes that carbon labelling does have a role to play in moving people towards a low-carbon shopping basket, but that trying to put a label on everything isn’t the answer. It says that people don’t just want to be told that it’s up to them to choose the right products - they want government and retailers to act too, by taking the most environmentally damaging products off the shelves. You can download the report here: http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/blog/check-out-carbon

See the climate changing on Google Earth

Climate change is difficult to grasp, and different ways to present the effects clearly are always good news.
Google earth collaborates now with the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey to add layers which to make Climate change more visible.

” The Met Office Hadley Centre has produced a layer which illustrates their future temperature modeling, showing an animation of temperature change over the next hundred years and its impact to particular parts of the world.

The scientists of the British Antarctic Survey have developed a layer which details how they monitor and measure the effects of climate change in Antarctica, featuring stunning images that show the retreat of the ice from this environmentally-sensitive continent.

Featured on our Google Earth Outreach Showcase, which provides more than 100 examples of KML content telling stories about our planet, are these two layersThese two KML files offer a unique distillation of informed, scientific and geographically-organized information demonstrating the commitment by the British Government to continue to carry out this important climate research and to communicate the results of the research by making this information readily accessible.”

So, have a try ! Climate Change in Our World and Climate Change in Our World, Antarctica.

Climate Change and Wine Industry

In the last decade, climate change has gradually turned into a major topic in the media as well as one of the most cited concerns of the European citizens. Fuelled in the public perception by a number of disastrous weather events such as the 2003 heat wave, the Katrina hurricane or the exceptional 2007 fire season in Greece, global warming is to become the after scene for human activities throughout the XXIst century.

Furthermore, the last two years have yielded a new level of awareness, thanks to the near simultaneous dissemination of the “Stern report”, the 4th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and Al Gore’s movie. As symbolised by the latest Peace Nobel Prize and the active preparation of the post-Koto process, this sense of urgency has also invaded the agendas of political and business decision makers alike.

Strongly connected to climate evolution through the various reactions of vineyards themselves, the wine industry has been in the forefront of this movement looking at climate change as a major issue to be tackled. Symposia on this topic are now flourishing, and occurred in 2007 from Dijon to Auckland, from Zaragoza to Chicago. The “2008 season” will be launched in January by Al Gore himself in Madrid at the “II World Meeting on Climate Change & Wine”.

How climate change affects and will affect vineyards

Wine is the canary in the climate-change coal mine, according to climatologists. Even slight changes can wreak havoc on high-quality wine, making it particularly vulnerable to global warming. This reactivity of grapevine to climate variability was studied before anthropogenic climate change appeared at the agenda. Historical data from 1350 to now were analyzed by Leroy Ladurie & his collegues, illustrating the sensitivity of vineyard production and quality related to climate, providing an exceptional background to the most recent studies.

As stated in the latest IPCC report, the world mean temperature has risen by 0.6°C since 1860. The XXth century was most probably the hottest century of the millennium, while 1990-2000 was its warmest decade. This continuous increase of temperature is still on its way and developed a whole range of effects on vineyards across the world, readily noticed and studied by the vintners.

The most impacted vineyards so far are the ones already initially in the warmest places like around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, and California, South Africa and Australia for the rest of the world. High temperatures linked to soil erosion and an increasing lack of precipitation induce sugar and alcohol excess, if not “grilled” grapes leading to a decrease of the production. This has recently led French wine regulators to approve the use of vineyard irrigation, reversing centuries of tradition to rescue regions suddenly too hot for dry farming. In South Africa, winter temperatures can be so mild that the vegetative cycle has to be stopped by chemical treatments to obtain the needed dormancy.

Throughout the world, the excess CO2 concentration has led to very/too prolific grapevines, to a modification if not an extended distribution of some microbial pest and their vector insects, while the rise in temperature induced a 15 to 30 days advancing of the harvest dates (hence a difficulty to hire harvesters in some cases !).

If some places are slowly becoming unsuitable for vineyards, others are opening up. Pr Gregory Jones from Southern Oregon University, one of the leading experts of climate change and vineyard, demonstrated a displacement of 80 to 250 km pole wards of the favourable regions since 1950. Vineyards are coming back to Belgium, Holland, England, Denmark and Sweden and are also heading North in the US and Canada.

On the other hand, weather also influences the chemical composition of the fruits, hence the wine quality. This quality has been shown to rise with temperature until a specific threshold is reached, after which the quality goes down again. If the last decade witnessed a number of places, like the Bordeaux region, to increase the number of very good years, the continuous rise in temperature expected from now to 2050 should bring most of the world actual vineyards across this threshold.

Of course adaptations are possible, and experienced via a number of viticultural practices mixed with switches to varieties more adapted to the new climate. But some scientists warn that if the IPCC worst case scenario of an additional 4°C rise from now to 2100 was to happen, it would severely compress the time and investment needed to adapt and develop new varieties.

The wine industry’s reaction

All these existing and expected consequences of climate change on vineyards have led the whole sector to question on its own responsibility in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Amongst the main sources is the use of biocide, fertilizers and mechanised equipments for growing the grapes, but also the wine fermentation process, and most of all, wine transportation and packaging. A first batch of studies allowed putting global figures, and as an example, the wine industry was shown to account for the quarter of the 1.5% of the 670 million tonnes of the UK’s annual greenhouse gas emissions produced by the alcohol industry.

Another study has calculated an average of 2 kg of CO2 per litre of wine, hence global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from wine production and distribution are 5,336,600 tons in 2001, representing as much as 0.08 percent of global GHG produced by human activities. Although it looks like a small percentage, it is equivalent to the fossil fuel combustion emissions of roughly 1,000,000 passenger vehicles over a year.

Measures to reduce these emissions are as numerous as the sources, and are already intensively explored by some regions like the Champagne, which has the objective to reduce them by 20 to 30% in the next 10 years. In Spain, Torres is replacing cars for his 115-member sales force with hybrid vehicles and installing photovoltaic panels to generate heat and 670 kilowatts of electricity. The panels fill 11 percent of the power needs at the main site in Pacs. A group of seven wine trade companies from Ireland and UK have commissioned the building of two sailing ships to carry sustainably their Bordeaux wine with a minimum carbon footprint.

The spectrum of potential measures is wide and includes for example avoiding the conversion of forests or productive farmland to vineyards, minimizing agrichemical use, maximizing water efficiency, improving the efficiency of winery operation, using renewable energy and biofuels, procuring recycled-content bottles, manufactured regionally, reducing shipping distance and select the most efficient mode possible, which means not shipping by air. Finally, once all economically feasible carbon emissions mitigation measures have been put in place, it is also possible now to purchase certified carbon offsets for all remaining activities.