Climate change could devastate Europe's spruce forests and hit pasta production

Europe’s rural landscape will be transformed in as little as 25 years by climate change, according to the results of an international study led by the Met Office.

Assuming a global temperature rise of 4C by 2100, the biggest effects are predicted to hit Europe’s northern and southern extremes. By 2035, Mediterranean summers will already be more than 2C hotter than at present and Scandinavian winters up to 2C milder.

The changes are likely to lead to the destruction of vast areas of spruce forest in central Europe and Scandinavia because of a rising population of bark beetles and other pests. Crops such as durum wheat used to produce pasta could begin vanishing from the Mediterranean basin, which will become too hot and dry for economic production. The palsa mires of northern Scandinavia, partially frozen peatland that is the home to rare plants and species of wading birds, could disappear completely.

The warning comes from the five-year Ensembles project, an EU-sponsored study carried out by 66 research centres in 20 countries across Europe. The project has been led by the Met Office, which is hosting a conference to announce its findings this week.
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By combining the forces of some of the most powerful super-computers in Europe, the researchers were able to generate the most precise and detailed predictions to date for European climate change.

Announcing the results at the Met Office headquarters today, Professor Paul Van der Linden, director of the project said: “We’re looking at very immediate impacts in the next ten to twenty years. These short-term projections have never been seen before. Sometimes climate change is seen as a distance prospect — now we can see it’s just around the corner.”

The findings counter a common assumption among agricultural policy makers that the benefits to crops from elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will outweigh the drawbacks.

In the case of Central European and Scandinavian spruce forests, most previous models had predicted that wood production would increase, as the trees would grow faster in warmer conditions. However, the latest impact projections found that shorter winters would mean longer breeding seasons for bark beetles and other pests.

Above a certain threshold, this could permit two or even three breeding cycles for the beetles each year, compared with the single cycle at present.

The spruce bark beetle can kill millions of trees during large outbreaks, which normally occur after wind-storm damage that provides a fertile damp breeding ground for the insects. Dr Lars Barring, who led the forestry projections, said it was vital that forests are managed on the basis of the predictions in order to avoid significant losses.

The new projections work on a much finer scale than previous global climate models, which typically work on a spatial scale of around 700 square km. The Ensemble projections given at a 25 square km resolution, providing a much more precise idea of future regional temperature and rainfall.

The simulations show that under a business-as-usual scenario significant temperature changes will be seen as soon as 2035, with London's average summer temperature increasing by 1.8C from 16.7C to 18.1C.