TELLURIS - Climate Change Resilient Wine Regions

Climate change is impacting Mediterranean viticulture with reduced water availability, rising temperatures, and extreme weather events, affecting grape quality and yields. Despite challenges, preserving viticulture is vital for the region's heritage and sustainable development. Adaptation strategies must be systemic, considering long-term climate trends, resource availability, and broader agricultural and economic factors. Collective action and foresight are essential for a comprehensive and effective adaptation plan to ensure the resilience of Mediterranean winegrowing. The TELLURIS project aims to develop local to regional adaptation plans in eight Mediterranean regions of five of the biggest wine producing European countries, focusing on transformative systemic adaptations and nature-based solutions to combat climate change impacts on viticulture. The process of crafting the adaptation strategy will be guided by multi-stakeholder participation and informed by evidence from remote sensing, in-situ observations, and soil analyses collected from nine extensive demonstration sites, where some of the selected nature-based and smart farming climate adaptation methods will be tested. In conjunction with these pathways, TELLURIS will establish a network of viticulture regions within the scope of the Mission Adaptation to Climate Change. This network will leverage the disseminated findings from the project to craft their unique adaptation strategies and introduce transformative changes to the European wine sector. The future roadmap for this transformation will be guided by an upscaling methodology that will be developed during the project to generate suitability maps for regions with similar adaptation potential as the TELLURIS regions. It will also be supported by the establishment of climate adaptation support tools and services built upon the tested solutions, complete with clearly defined business models.