Australia maps the march of climate change

The University of Tasmania has just launched its Climate Atlas, to help the Australian wine industry understand how climate change will affect the wine industry this century.
 

A graphic from the Climate Atlas
A graphic from the Climate Atlas

Australian winemakers and viticulturists now have a new resource for tackling climate change – a graphics heavy Climate Atlas, that shows how climate change will change their region. The goal of the atlas is to give the wine industry the information it needs to plan.

Developed by the Climate Futures Group at the University of Tasmania and funded by Wine Australia, Australia’s wine future: A Climate Atlas describes short- and long-term trends for Australian wine regions until 2100. It took three years to create.

Climate Futures Group lead and University of Tasmania climatology expert, Dr Rebecca Harris, said the project’s objective was to provide detailed climate predictions in useful way to Australia’s wine producers.

“The aim was to improve understanding of climate information and to empower communities to plan for the coming season and for the future,” she said, adding that the project identified weather risks that are particularly important to grapegrowing within different wine regions.” She added that “we identified current approaches to managing weather and climate risks and determined how climate information might best be incorporated to manage risks in the future.”

Wine Australia General Manager RD&E Dr Liz Waters said the online atlas was a valuable resource to help the sector manage climate variability.

“Extreme weather events have always posed a challenge for grapegrowers around the world and this new resource will help Australia’s growers to choose adaptive strategies tailored for the changes in their region based on inter-annual and decadal projections,” she said. “Today, growers around Australia are the custodians of the vines planted by earlier generations and this atlas will help them understand how they can manage existing vineyards and plan new ones to ensure short- and long-term prosperity.”

Australia’s Wine Future was a collaborative research project funded by Wine Australia. It was led by the Antarctic Climate Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACE CRC, UTAS) in partnership with the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI), the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI), CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and 

The Climate Atlas resource is available for download from Wine Australia and Climate Futures.

Via press release

 

 

 

 

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