Liu Jiali
If one day, you can't taste the aromas of flowers and fruits, plant aromas, spices and other aromas in coffee and wine, will you still doubt that your tasting ability is wrong? Will you continue to like the fun they bring to your life as always? Let's expand our question to chocolate, and what if one day, the chocolate trees that grow in West Africa can't continue to grow because of climate change, and you can't eat chocolate anymore?
While none of this may be happening at the moment, if the climate continues to change, then perhaps in 50 years' time, the problems we assume will occur, but fortunately, more and more practitioners have a precautionary mindset, and in addition to improving planting techniques, they will also integrate environmental attitudes into it, so that they can always maintain these assumptions in a hypothetical state.
Wine From the details
For wine practitioners, the effects of climate change are already changing the way wines are made to some extent, such as more and more grapes are being harvested early, or some wines that used to require sugar treatment are now balanced without sugar. If you've ever followed the industry as a whole, you'll find that more and more wineries or wine regions are starting to make a big difference in environmental protection.
Bordeaux, one of the most important wine-producing regions, has been assessing its carbon footprint since 2008, followed by a "climate plan" that includes targets such as "reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% and saving 20% water use". From the perspective of vineyard growers, the things they have to care about are more grounded.
Indigenous grape varieties from Greece, Italy and other places have become the object of study by many agronomists
More and more winegrowers are trying to find local grape varieties that have not been noticed before to better cope with the possible climate change. Some indigenous grape varieties from Portugal, Greece or Italy have become the subject of study by many agronomists, often from the more hot Mediterranean islands, while others have set their sights on late-maturing grape varieties, which take longer to mature and may become ideal wine grapes in the future. In addition, the location of the vineyard is also included in the scope of consideration, the temperature changes brought by high altitude, the relatively reasonable temperature and sunshine in the shade of the hillside, etc., in fact, to some extent, will affect the growth and maturity of grapes.
Coffee strengthens sustainable development
If temperatures continue to rise, what will happen to the coffee industry? Some data show that when the temperature rises by an average of 2 ° C, the risk of coffee leaf rust and coffee tiger tianniu will increase - the leaves of plants with coffee leaf rust will be scratched to produce a fine brown powder similar to iron oxide, in addition to changing from bright green to brownish yellow, eventually making the plant lose its leaves, unable to bear fruit, and eventually allowing people to obtain coffee beans.
As a long labor-intensive process, coffee beans take about three or four years from cultivation to finally become a drinkable coffee product, and many coffees are grown by small farmers, and in the absence of funds and resources, their resilience to environmental changes is very weak. Coupled with the fact that coffee itself is an extremely delicate plant, once it encounters inappropriate terroir conditions, it will have various problems, which will lead to a decline in production.
Want to continue drinking coffee in the future? Taking environmental protection as your way of life from now on may make coffee stay with us longer.
However, more and more people in the coffee industry are beginning to realize this and are beginning to try to improve the problem. For example, some coffee conglomerates will require fair trade to ensure that every coffee farmer can get their due income and be willing to grow coffee in the future, while companies represented by Nespresso Coffee will do something for the environment from other levels. "We have long worked with the Rainforest Alliance on the Nespresso AAA Sustainable Quality Program," said Lin Shangming, General Manager of Nespresso Coffee Greater China, "and the Rainforest Alliance is committed to ensuring the sustainability of coffee cultivation, while also protecting the local agroforestry industry and improving the living standards of local coffee farmers." This program improves coffee quality, increases the efficiency of coffee cultivation, and is our long-term commitment to the environment. "In addition, carbon neutrality has become another goal of strong coffee. Lin Shangming said that it will achieve its goals by using environmentally friendly material packaging, strengthening recycling, planting trees around the world, etc. "We also have capsule online recycling projects for individuals and enterprises, hoping that everyone can work with us to do environmental protection and delay global warming." ”
Chocolate Rescue Project may be launched
Rising temperatures, evaporating moisture and increasing drought are not good news for cocoa trees that rely on high humidity and heavy precipitation – assuming temperatures rise by only 2.1°C over the next 30 years, the cocoa trees will also be hit hard.
As with coffee cultivation, most of the cocoa growers are smallholder farmers, which means that they are not very resilient to the unknown, and even if there is a predictable "chocolate deficit" in the future, they may not be able to find a solution.
Even if the temperature rises by only 2.1°C over the next 30 years, the cocoa tree will be fatally damaged.
For these farmers, the way to cope with the warming of the climate may be to find newer planting sites, and it is said that cocoa growers have illegally cultivated in forest protected areas to meet market demand – of course, this is not the result that people of insight want to see, but how to change this situation in a reasonable and effective way may be a problem for everyone.
Some argue that agronomists can help farmers to screen cocoa varieties and make those varieties that are more drought-tolerant and more disease-resistant become the mainstream in the future, and at the same time, there are suggestions for cocoa cultivation, such as the use of shade covering, etc., and even the idea that cocoa can be better traits through genetically modified means to make it calmly face possible future environmental threats.
Although there is still no clear answer to what means to solve this problem, it is at least certain that it is always right to make environmental protection a habit of your own life, and it is always right to start from every detail to reduce carbon emissions and delay global warming.
Editor-in-Charge: Li Shuping
Proofreader: Luan Meng