-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Twelve years ago, Vincenzo Amata stumbled upon a plot of flowering trees while wandering the Sicilian countryside. Before long, he found a farmer tending the grove.
As Amata asked one question after another, the stranger tugged a mango off a tree and offered it to him. He didn't know it, but his first bite of the bright yellow fruit would change his life. "I can still taste it to this day," Amata said in Italian.
The burst of sweet flavor, coupled with its smooth, velvety texture, was unlike anything he'd ever tasted. "I got chills, goosebumps all over my skin, it was so delicious." Six months later, Amata left a lifelong career as a clothing salesman to launch his own mango farm.
It put him "very out of my element. But I just fell in love with it." Amata has since grown six popular varieties of the tropical fruit on PapaMango, his 17-acre grove in Messina on the northeastern coast of Sicily.
As climate change complicates growing the region's historically emblematic crops, like olives and lemons, Amata is seeing more farmers follow the same path. They are all "already starting to change from lemons to mangoes," he said. Rising temperatures, shifting precipitation, and emerging diseases are among the mélange of climate impacts changing what's grown in breadbaskets around the world.
As warming brings significant chal.