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Climate Change

Photograph of Adrian NewtonClimate change is one of three cross-cutting themes identified as part of The Scottish Government's research strategy. Here Dr Adrian Newton, SCRI’s climate change champion, talks about its likely impact and how research at SCRI aims to prepare Scottish agriculture for the future.

 

 

Question: What impact do you expect climate change to have on the Scottish weather?

Over the next 50 years the average temperature is likely to increase by at least a couple of degrees, which means there will be less snow and frost. There will also be more variability and extremes.

Rainfall may not change substantially overall but its distribution is likely to change, particularly with drier summers and wetter winters. However, this will vary regionally. Based on how the weather has changed over the past 40 years the west is likely to become much wetter and the east will probably just be drier in summer and may not be much wetter in the winter, for example.

Question: What would this mean for Scottish agriculture?

The effect of these changes will be a longer growing season but that isn’t necessarily all good news for several reasons; one of which is if it’s wet when we need to either sow or harvest there are operational difficulties.

However, as conditions change, pests and pathogens adapt to exploit any opportunity. We can make a limited number of predictions but pests and pathogen interactions with plants and climate are complex and we don’t know enough to predict them all.

Another consequence of the longer growing season will be the effects on yield and quality but again we cannot necessarily predict whether these will be good news or bad.

We cannot make too many generalisations about what might happen but in specific cases, for example blackcurrant, where we know there is a requirement for winter chill to synchronise bud break and therefore development, ripening and harvest then we’ve got a specific problem to address. This is an active area of research where we are adapting the plants to climate change we know will occur.

But in general crops need to adapt in this sort of way, in other words we need more resilience to stresses; whether they are from the climate directly or indirectly via pests and pathogens.

Photograph of the Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder at SCRIQuestion: Are there any potential benefits from changes in the weather?

There will be a longer growing season and the effects of that will be that cropping patterns change, so we may introduce new crops or other crops may disappear. For example, we grow seed potato because it is virus free. But if there are more pests transmitting viruses there could be a potential problem there and maybe we will grow less of them, unless we build in good resistance.

In the very long term there might be the potential to grow two crops of potato a year, like they do in Jersey. New crops might come in, such as maize, a fodder crop which is currently grown further south but if we do that then we will also introduce increased disease problems for cereals because maize encourages fusarium head blight.

Question: What kind of research is SCRI doing in relation to climate change?

We need to continue to try and obtain broad spectrum or basal resistance in crops so that it is effective against a wide range of pathogens including those not currently a problem, particularly, for example, bacterial pathogens of potato.

We also need resilience in terms of yield and quality as well, particularly in Scotland for the malt whisky market to be able to maintain the high quality of malt varieties. All the work like that is done in conjunction with commercial breeders and we now have very effective research networks with them.

Photograph of Ben Klibreck blackcurrantsQuestion: What practical outputs have there been/do we expect from this research?

We have developed new blackcurrant varieties, Ben Vane and Ben Klibreck, that cope with the lack of winter chill. In many ways we are developing the tools for accessing the biodiversity available in crops for utilisation to adapt those crops to climate change.

All the potato and barley resources we hold; in terms of genotypes and genotyping technology; is so we can understand much more about the process of adaptation in order to target and isolate particular desirable traits and characteristics in crops. By developing these tools we will be better equipped to work on new more resilient varieties.

Question: How is SCRI working with other MRPs on climate change?

We are collaborating on assessing the possible impacts of climate change across Scottish land use, looking at all aspects including agriculture, livestock and upland use.

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