project to investigate how growing food within the Eastbourne area is being affected by climate change impacts, and researching how best to support growers trying to adapt to those impacts
Climate change is impacting the natural world in a variety of ways, forcing animals and plants to adapt as best they can to conditions that they may not have experienced before. Many of those plants are ones that humans rely upon for food and some of them are staple foods that humans have grown in abundance and have consequently become dependent upon for most of their daily nutritional requirements.
Here in the UK the climate is changing rapidly, with milder, wetter winters and hotter, dryer summers becoming the norm, together with more frequent episodes of extreme weather, such as intense rainfall events, long droughts, heatwaves, etc. This is forcing UK food growers to adapt to changing climatic conditions in various ways, with varying degrees of success. With the aid of grant funding from the Blue Heart Project, the Eastbourne Eco Action Network has partnered up with the Eastbourne Food Partnership to start investigating how local food growers are trying to adapt to climate change and researching what techniques, resources and support such growers may need to help them successfully adapt to the changing climate.