Climate change impacts on agriculture's southern frontier – Perspectives for farming in North Patagonia

Abstract

Winter chill is expected to decrease in many of the suitable growing regions for deciduous trees. Argentinean North Patagonia hosts extensive fruit tree cultivation, which provides an important contribution to both local and global food security. Using historic records from 11 weather stations from North Patagonia, we evaluate the possible impacts of climate change on fruit tree cultivation. We assess winter chill and seasonal heat availability, and the risk of spring frost events based on outputs from 15 Global Climate Models (GCMs) for two Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios and two future time periods (represented by central years 2050 and 2085). Metrics were estimated for 47 years of records from the weather stations, as well as typical conditions for 10 past scenarios and 60 future GCM and RCP projections. Scenarios consisted of 100 plausible annual temperature records produced by a weather generator. Results suggest that fruit tree dormancy in Argentinean North Patagonia will not be strongly affected by climate change. Compared to

Revisiting climate change effects on winter chill in mountain oases of northern Oman

“…Using a running mean function, instead of a linear regression function as in previous studies (Fernandez et al 2020a), allowed us to closely track local temperature change dynamics over the past few decades. Following common practice in climate-related assessments (Benmoussa et al 2018;del Barrio et al 2020;Fernandez et al 2020b), we produced temperature scenarios for eight past points in time (1991, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2018).…”

Climate change impacts on temperate fruit and nut production: a systematic review

“…While a number of adaptation and mitigation strategies to cope with the effects of climate change on agriculture are being explored by scientists in warm temperate regions, many of these strategies may take as long as 10 to 20 years to be implemented ( Bruinsma, 2003 ). Promising strategies may include shifts to more suitable cultivation areas ( Drogoudi et al., 2020 ; Fernandez et al., 2020a ; del Barrio et al., 2021 ; Rojas et al., 2021 ; Noorazar et al., 2022 ; Meza et al., 2023 ), crop replacement and diversification ( Valverde et al., 2015 ; Almagro et al., 2023 ; Rezgui et al., 2024 ), the introduction of new cultivars ( Funes et al., 2016 ; Ruiz et al., 2019 ; Arenas-Castro et al., 2020 ; Cantin et al., 2020 ; Drogoudi et al., 2020 ), water management strategies ( Fraga et al., 2020 ; Aguirre-Garcia et al., 2021 ; Gutierrez-Gamboa et al., 2022 ; Lulane et al., 2022 ; Espinoza-Meza et al., 2023 ; Rojano-Cruz et al., 2023 ), and technological adaptation ( Luzio et al., 2021 ; Mazis et al., 2021 ; Rojas et al., 2021 ; Teker, 2023 ). However, as the impacts of climate change become increasingly severe, the adaptation and adoption of such strategies will require local and regional research, as well as effective governmental policies focused on the implementation of sustainable management practices and the adoption of new technologies.…”

Non‐uniform changes of growing conditions for sweet cherry trees responses to climate warming in main production regions of China

“…For estimating heat accumulation, growing degree day (GDD) and growing degree hour (GDH) models are widely applied (Benmoussa et al, 2017;Fraga and Santos, 2021). Heat forcing conditions showed positive trends with expected increases during the current century in North Patagonia (del Barrio et al, 2020), whereas decreasing trend was projected under future scenarios over inner southern Portugal (Santos et al, 2017). Shifts in the balance between chilling and forcing would be different among growing regions, which will further have an impact on the geographical distribution of specific varieties.…”

“…Using global climate models (GCMs), various studies have projected winter chill availability under climate change scenarios, for example, for California (Luedeling, Zhang, et al, 2009), Chile (Fernandez, Whitney, Cuneo, and Luedeling, 2020), Oman (Buerkert et al, 2020), Australia (Darbyshire et al, 2013; Darbyshire et al, 2016,) Patagonia (del Barrio et al, 2020), Tunisia (Benmoussa et al, 2018; Benmoussa et al, 2020), Europe (Campoy et al, 2019; Fraga et al, 2019), and at the global scale (Luedeling et al, 2011). Most projections demonstrated a substantial winter chill reduction in future scenarios, but the extent of these decreases varied across sites and with the future time period.…”