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New Zealand sea temperatures rise faster than global average

12 July 2024 By Sarah Neish

The cool-climate country, which has until now been relatively untouched by climate change, is starting to hot up, a new study reveals.

While the likes of Italy and Spain have faced consistently rising temperatures, with summer months in these countries reaching 45°C or higher, New Zealand has made much of its fortuitously cool climate, and the freshness it affords the country’s wines.

Surrounded by ocean on all sides, and with an average annual rainfall of between 600ml and 1,600ml spread evenly throughout the year, New Zealand and its vineyards have long benefited from these optimum conditions, which have led to its wines being among the most sought-after in the world.

However, a newly released study suggests that the country may not be quite as immune to the effects of climate change as once thought.

Data from Stats NZ shows that New Zealand’s sea temperatures are creeping up at a world-beating rate, topping out at two or three times higher than the global average.

Since 1982, the study found, oceanic sea-surface temperatures have increased on average between 0.16 – 0.26C every 10 years, and between 0.19–0.34C in coastal waters.

Compared with data from the previous 20 years, New Zealand has experienced twice the rate of ocean surface warming as the global per decade average of 0.18C, with one underwater region – the Chatham Rise, located to the east of New Zealand – three times warmer than the global average.

“New Zealand sits sandwiched between the Pacific, the Tasman Sea and the Southern Oceans – there’s a lot of warming associated in all three of those areas, so we are getting the heat from all directions,” said Matt Pinkerton, a principal scientist at the National Institute for Water and Atmospherics.

“Because we are surrounded by so much ocean, we [thought] we were protected a bit by warming effects. This [data] is saying that’s not true.”

Unfortunately, what happens at sea does not simply stay at sea, as New Zealanders are likely to feel the effects of the warming seas on land, with ocean activity dictating much of the nation’s weather.

While the new stats may be shocking, New Zealand’s wine industry has been working to insure itself and its hero grape against global warming for some time now, not least through the Bragato Research Institute’s ‘Sauvignon Blanc: 2.0’ programme.

The project has one goal: to increase the diversity of Sauvignon Blanc vines in New Zealand, with researchers aiming to create as many as 12,000 new variants of Sauvignon Blanc in order to analyse which are most resilient to a changing climate.

“Most of New Zealand’s Sauvignon Blanc is just one clone. We were fortunate enough to find a genetic variety that works really well here, so it was propagated en masse across the country,” explains Dr. Darrell Lizamore from the institute, who is excited about the “plethora of materials that will be available to us” by the end of the project.

Lizamore told db that so far the project has been successful in producing 4,000 vines, and a number of high-profile New Zealand wine producers have partnered with the institute to plant these vines in their estates once they are ready for transferral.

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