Two women who care passionately about our changing climate, wine writer Elaine Chukan Brown and sustainability scientist Professor Kimberly Nicholas, who has a special interest in biodiversity, farming, wine and food, discuss what we as individuals can do in the face of our rapidly warming planet. They look at the bigger picture but also how climate change affects wine production and how wine lovers might play their part in reducing carbon emissions. ‘Wine is a fingerprint or a taste of climate change,’ says Nicholas, whose PhD topic was the effect of climate change on the wine industry in her native California. She identifies the three areas in which we can have greatest personal effect by modifying our behaviour and actually quantifies a wine-bottle carbon emission equivalent of a round-trip flight between London and New York. (It’s many more than you might think!) They discuss how apparently small decisions such as how wine is packaged can have a considerable effect. And Nicholas is a realist. Her book Under the Sky We Make; How to be Human in a Warming World has a cheat sheet at the end for those who’d rather use that than read the whole book. Very considerate….

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