Developing Climate-Ready Apple Production Systems in Switzerland

In the context of a rapidly changing climate, the research project Developing climate-ready apple production systems in Switzerland pursues the goal of increasing the climatic resilience of the Swiss apple sector to make sure it can continue to maintain its enviable position as the country’s leading fruit sector and as one that significantly contributes to Swiss food self-sufficiency.

The project’s first step investigates how climate change has affected apple growing in Switzerland until now, and how it is likely to affect it in the decades to come. Concretely speaking, an agro-climatic model linking production data from Switzerland and other important European apple-producing regions to climatic data representative of those areas is built, with the intent of estimating the region-wide impact of extreme weather phenomena like drought, heat waves and late frost on apple yields. The estimates derived from this model are then used to forecast how apple yields are likely to evolve across the different Swiss apple-growing areas in the future, based on the most recent climate change scenarios available for the country. In parallel to this statistical work are a series of semi-structured interviews carried out with apple growers whose orchards are spread out across Switzerland. By aiming to capture how the impacts of climate change translate into changes in apple growers’ lives, these interviews fill the need to gather inputs on how producers adapt to new climatic realities, what are the biggest hurdles currently slowing down their adaptation, as well as, which tools they think they lack to make their orchards more resilient.

Drawing on the outputs of both the agro-climatic model and the field interviews, the project will head into its final phase, where in-depth assessments of the most promising solutions for the development of more resilient production systems, such as the introduction of cultivars robust to specific abiotic stress factors, the expansion of irrigation systems and changes in growing areas, will be made. As a final step, and in partnership with the Schweizer Obstverband/Fruit-Union Suisse, the project’s conclusions will be summarized in the form of a policy paper addressed to Swiss apple producers, in an effort to help the latter transit towards more climate-resilient apple-growing systems in the future.

This fellowship is hosted by the Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center and the World Food System Center.