I’m a wine critic and author with 30 years of tasting and fieldwork experience. It was the changing taste of my favourite wines that brought me to climate change, I founded The Wine and Climate Institute in Oxford (www.twacci.org) in 2016, after having published my first book on wine and climate change in 2014. This blog contains extracts from my UN research, my talks, articles and books, and it is all about wine, climate change, freshwater management, the water and earth sciences, coastal and maritime cultures such as the Vikings and the Saami, Northern issues, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and TEK, etc. Basically, all things Water and anything else that interests me. My greatest hope is to be part of the solution.
From the whisper of a drop of rain falling onto a humid forest floor to the roar of a sea storm thundering against a stony cliff, water speaks. It shares its memories, conveys its needs, and imparts its wisdom. Despite all of its forms, the many voices of this elusive and magical shapeshifter are not being heard. And time is running out. In 2015, the UN fully committed itself to implement its 17 Sustainable Development Goal Agenda by 2030. Presently, the concern is that COVID-19 and its far-reaching, socio-economic impacts have retarded this progress, and an urgent call has been raised for new and innovative approaches to further propel the needed implementation actions. The UN suggests that the Covid pandemic is the main setback, but there are other, more critical factors that are hampering progress, particularly in the agricultural sector and pertaining to freshwater management and luxury crops. Here, the implementation of sustainable farming practices is being impeded by
1) a lack of understanding of the severity of conventional farming’s ecological impacts,
2) a disregard for, and resistance to, Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and
3) a Western mindset divorced from nature. Combined, these factors create an inability to perceive an incentivising business case sufficiently robust to trump these obstacles.
With more prolonged and severe droughts and irregular rainfall patterns, increased freshwater irrigation is being relied upon as the primary adaptation tool, when it is mitigation’s greatest foe. One of the greatest threats to the climate is the use of agricultural irrigation, which accounts for 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawal. This can be changed. The transition away from freshwater irrigation to dry farming or to rainwater harvesting could substantially reduce agriculture’s water footprint, reducing surface and groundwater depletion as well as increasing soil health and yields. Investing in sustainable agricultural practices needs to be understood to not be an obligation, but an opportunity. This is particularly critical in the context of luxury crops such as cacao, coffee, sugar, tobacco, and wine, where large-scale, industrial irrigation is unnecessarily used in excess to increase yields and profits, compromising ecological viability in favour of economic gain. In this context, the risk of not irrigating is mistakenly perceived as greater than the damage and short-term advantages of irrigation.
The cultivation of luxury crops has fallen into the same intense farming systems as the cash, subsistence crops. Wine, as well as cacao, coffee, tobacco, and sugarcane, have become mono-cultures, grown in non-indigenous climates and habitats. The foreign habitat and lack of biodiversity create the need for chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides. This is then acerbated by freshwater irrigation used to further artificially increase yields resulting in soil degradation, erosion, salinisation, and inferior crop quality, which further increases carbon release and feeds the cycle of extreme drought and rain patterns, imploding the eco-systems. There is no case for employing freshwater irrigation in luxury crops. The combination of dry farming and limited supplemental irrigation through harvested rainwater, using region-appropriate TEK and native varieties, is the only viable economic, ecologic, and socially-responsible solution towards securing optimal sustainable crop yields.
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute
