Can the world’s wine regions survive climate change?

We are in the midst of a global wine crisis.

Wildfires, droughts, extreme cold, and heat are grape-killers. The $500-billion industry?is now seeing billions of dollars in value being wiped out. That impacts tens of millions of people who live in communities in or around the world’s wine regions.

At CityAge, we’ve decided to do something about it.

We are launching ?Saving Wine Country — a campaign that will look at the solutions to this global crisis. We often think about coastal cities as the most vulnerable to climate change. The reality is that wine country is where an entire economy and way of life is being disrupted.

(If you want to be involved in this campaign — which will feature CityAge events, roundtables, and written content — please subscribe to our waitlist.)

One of the wine regions CityAge is initially focusing on will be the Okanagan in British Columbia, a pretty special place — it’s even home to one of only a handful of desert-like spaces in Canada: the Osoyoos Desert. It’s also the heart of B.C.’s $3.75-billion wine industry, which is now in full crisis mode.

You might say it’s the canary in the wine.

This region, home to hundreds of thousands of people, is being hit by massive wildfires, -30-degree cold snaps, extraordinary 50C+ heat domes, and drought. Even the air can now be bad news when wildfire smoke seeps into the grapes and makes them unusable.

And, of course, there are knock-on effects when a huge industry is impacted. Tourism goes down, which translates into hundreds of millions of dollars lost for B.C., and cities and towns are deeply affected.

It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. There are solutions. The B.C. government has begun to respond to the crisis by providing funding for income losses and crop renewal, as well as tools to help grape growers be climate-prepared.

Another bright spot is research being done at the University of British Columbia’s Wine Research Centre, which announced a project last March dedicated to finding solutions to mitigate climate change’s impact on the wine industry.

CityAge thinks globally, of course. And this is a global issue, with wine producers and growers all over in the $500-billion wine industry being impacted by climate change. Consider Argentina, which has been losing vineyard surface since 2015 due to “water scarcity, rising temperatures, and drought-like conditions,” according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), or the U.S. and South Africa, both of which have had lower wine production in recent years due to reduced water supply and drought, the OIV say.

All of this points to the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and finding ways to be considerate of water use. In terms of the latter, we love the ideas shared in journalist Erica Gies’ book, Water Always Wins, in which she makes the case for working with water in a collaborative way rather than trying to control it.

This network of thousands of CityAge solution-makers can play a role in creating a sustainable wine industry; one that will benefit the communities these producers and growers are part of, as well as nearby agricultural lands.

We can’t wait to see what you all can do to help wine country!