Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation Challenges in Szekszárd Wine Region, Hungary

Abstract

Wine producers face several challenges regarding climate change, which will affect this industry both in the present and the future. Vulnerability assessments are at the forefront of current climate research, therefore, the present paper has two main aims. First, to assess two components of climate vulnerability regarding the Szekszárd wine region, Hungary; second, to collect and analyze adaptation farming techniques in terms of environmental sustainability aspects. Exposure analyses revealed that the study area will face several challenges regarding intensive drought periods in the future. Sensitivity indicators show the climate-related characteristics of the most popular grapevines and their relatively high level of susceptibility regarding changing climatic patterns. Since both external and intrinsic factors of vulnerability show deteriorating trends, the development of adaptation actions is needed. Adaptation interventions often provide unsustainable solutions or entail maladaptation issues, therefore, an environmental-focused sustainability assessment of collected interventions was performed to avoid long-term negative path dependencies. The applied evaluation methodology pointed out that nature-based adaptation actions are preferred in comparison to using additional machines or resource-intensive solutions. This study can fill the scientific gap by analyzing this wine region for the first time, via performing an ex-ante lock-in analysis of available and widely used adaptation interventions in the viticulture sector.