According to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), global warming could alter the productivity of olive groves in the Mediterranean.
According to Luigi Ponti, a researcher at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development and lead author of the research, some regions will increase their performance but others will be affected by desertification.
In Spain, a decrease in net profit is expected in the central zone and an increase at the national level. Scientists from Rome (Italy) and Kensington (USA) have used a demographic model to predict the alterations that the olive harvest would suffer in the Mediterranean basin, assuming that the global average temperature will increase by 2 ° C between 2030 and 2060.
In this context, the average net profit derived from the olive harvest would increase by 9.6% due to the decrease in the olive fly plague and the increase in fruit production. However, not all areas will respond the same to climate change.
In North Africa, the yield would grow to 41% while in the Middle East it would fall by 7.1% . The study predicts the growing abandonment of small farms and, in short, a general change in the map of olive production in the Mediterranean basin.
For Ponti, the role of small farms and farms is crucial, because they benefit the ecosystem and help “soil and biodiversity conservation, and the prevention of forest fires. In the EU as a whole, the viability of small olive farms is further compromised by the subsidy policies that currently favor intensive production systems ”.
According to this Italian expert, the biological processes that govern the dynamics of the olive and the olive fly are useful in bioeconomic analyzes to warn of the effects that the climate will exert on the biological system as a whole. “The physiological analogy that has been used in the prediction allows us to explicitly describe the biology of species throughout the food web, including humans and their economics.”
