Impact of climate change on productivity and quality of temperate fruits and its management strategies

Abstract

The entire temperate Himalayan region extending from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh in India has a unique and fragile eco-system, where the very sustenance and livelihood to more than half of the population are directly or indirectly dependent on horticulture or agriculture and draws about 60 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from the surrounding ecological resources. The temperate climate offers tremendous opportunities to produce high quality fruits like apple, peach, plum, almonds, apricot, walnut etc. There has been a marked growth in area and production of these crops but the productivity has remained low and made no significant advancement as compared to other advanced countries. The low productivity is a result of number of factors such as environmental, physiological and biological but the environmental or fast climatic changes are playing a significant role in the form of droughts, erratic rains or snowfall, increase temperature besides change, depleting of glacier resources, change in the pattern of seasons etc. The IMD monitoring reveals that temperatures are increasing in temperate and sub temperate areas by 0.05 0C/ year but the low warming scenario less than 10C is unlikely to effect the vernalisation of high-chill fruits (Apple, walnut, apricot, almond, cherry varieties) but if warming scenario exceeding 1.5 0C would certainly expect the dormancy or chilling requirement of both stone and pome-fruits. Because of rise in the temperature and decline in overall precipitation apple in lower attitudes is shifting upwards replacing with low chilling crops like peach and apricots. The effects of climate change on temperate horticulture in this region have shown certain changes and there is urgent need to give more emphasis on development of heat-and drought resistance crops where crop architecture and physiology may be genetically altered to adapt to warmer environmental conditions besides developing such technologies which mitigates and makes full use of the effects of changing climate.