Winemaker’s Bookshelf
Newly-released Climate Change Action Plan tackles the challenges for agriculture in adapting effectively.
I
t’s tough to recall that the world is getting warmer when you’ve just gone through two growing seasons in which it was hard to fully ripen your crop. We’ve heard both sides of the arguments about climate change and they are almost as extreme and polarized as American politicians.
A project was initiated by the British Columbia Agriculture Council to organize the B.C. Agriculture Climate Change Action Plan. It has been an ambitious project with a great many cooperating
organizations and individuals who provided funding, time, and information. Last year there was a series of 37 interviews and 12 focus groups held throughout the province. The proceedings of these meetings with producers and agricultural specialists were compiled into five reports plus an executive summary. All six documents are posted on the web at
www.bcagclimateaction.ca . Click under Latest Documents. During 2012-2013, the staff will continue the work with two new pilot projects: “On-farm adaptation practices” and “Regional agricultural adaptation strategies”.
The executive summary sets out the status of B.C. agriculture: Many family farms, the best farmland close to urban areas, the high price of agricultural land, the broad diversity of farm commodities, and the advancing age of farmers.
Adaptation to change in general is addressed in the opening remarks, with a discussion of the resources required and the ability to mobilize those resources in the face of change. Resilience is the ability of the industry to adapt to changing conditions.
It requires many inputs for an industry to be resilient: capital,
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By Gary Strachan Everyone complains about weather, but...
human resources, education, technology, research, extension, knowledge and information.
The documents are divided into five regional reports, with the
focus of each on the major agricultural activities of the region.
The report of the Okanagan Region is focused on ‘Wine Grape and Tree Fruit Production.’ The big questions we all ask are: “Is the change real?” and “What if we do nothing?”
The past data was summarized in the Executive Summary: “ ...over the past century the average annual temperature in B.C. has increased 1.2°C on average. Annual precipitation has also increased, on average by 22 per cent, with the greatest increase in winter and spring.
“This area has seen an increase in extreme wet and extreme dry conditions in summer. There has also been an increase in hot and decrease in extreme cold temperatures, along with more frequent and severe
wildfires.”
There are tables that estimate the impact of climate change on all of the environmental factors that affect agriculture, extrapolated to 2020, and then estimating their potential impact on agriculture, both positive and negative.
One of the major problems identified is that the resilience of B.C. agriculture is already strained. The
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