Climate Change and Water Management: Non-viability of Freshwater Irrigation in Viticulture
Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019
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As the world’s water wars wage on, it is critical to examine the incidence of irrigation use in wine grape production as a climate change adaptation strategy versus the need for the sector to implement dry farming as its primary mitigation strategy. It is interesting to note that this thirsty $300 billion industry (Wine: Global Industry Almanac 2012) has escaped scrutiny in the global water competition debate, especially as it is an international sector capable of immediate and significant climate action. “The link between social systems and food production systems in the context of wine production has become a tenuous one. Vineyards are often portrayed as glamorous holiday destinations as opposed to places of agricultural production or as factories implementing highly-advanced technology. The consumer regards wine production as a benign “past-time”, heavy with emotional attachments to historical and cultural allegories” (Johnson-Bell 2017). This blurs the causal link between the soil and the bottle. Wine is made from grapes (Vitis vinifera) and wine grapes are a luxury fruit crop. Indeed, they are the most important fruit crop in the world in terms of production and economic importance (Cramer et al.2006; Vivier and Pretorius 2002) as well as being the fruit crop the most susceptible to climatic changes (Mozell and Thach 2014). History has shown that wine production occurs in relatively narrow geographical and climatic ranges. In addition, “wine grapes have relatively large cultivar differences in climate suitability, further limiting some wine grapes to even smaller areas that are appropriate for their cultivation. These narrow niches for optimum quality and production put the cultivation of wine grapes at greater risk from
both short-term climate variability and long-term climate changes than other broader acre crops” (Jones and Alves 2011).
Wine and water use, then, is a relevant and useful test case for establishing sustainable water use in agriculture and water use as a whole. “Water is at the heart of adaptation to climate change, serving as the crucial link between the society and the environment” (United Nations 2018). Any climate action that assists in mitigating its waste is essential. Where “irrigated agriculture remains the largest user of water globally, accounting for 70% of global water abstraction” (OECD 2012), wine’s average global water footprint may not be enormous compared to other crops, or even to other luxury crops, but its blue water (freshwater) use is disproportionate to its overall production values. Where luxury crops such as coffee, chocolate, and tea have among the highest global average embedded water content (blue and green), their water use is predominantly green water, not blue. As stated in the 2018 United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR), the “key for change will be agriculture, the biggest source of water consumption and pollution.” In sites where irrigation is legally practiced, this is the greatest use of water in wine production. Eighty-three percent of the surface under vine is irrigated in the New World as opposed to 10% in the Old World (Montpelier.inra.fr). As both the need for irrigation in current planted acreage increases and the additional future acreage will need irrigation, it is clear that the wine grape can serve as the ideal “poster child” for illustrating the immediate need for drastic water management and for establishing the actions needed to ensure truly sustainable agriculture.