By In 2023, a new type of apple made its commercial debut at a trade show in Berlin. The Tutti is crisp, juicy and has that perfect blush tinge — a lovely cultivar that took decades to produce. But it has a bigger claim to fame: It is designed to thrive at temperatures as high as 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit).
The apple is a product of the Hot Climate Partnership, a collaboration between researchers and industry groups in Spain and New Zealand to create crops capable of thriving in ever-warmer climates. The group teamed up in 2002 in the midst of increasingly hot summers in the Catalan region of Spain that left apples grown there sunburned and mushy. After more than 20 years of crossbreeding for heat tolerance, the Tutti (whose research name is HOT84A1) was unveiled.
Now being grown as far afield as the United States, Chile and China, the Tutti joins a growing list of fruits and vegetables that researchers are trying to climate-proof as Earth heats up. Using tools ranging from the old-fashioned — crossbreeding, reviving Indigenous plants, heat-conscious planting techniques — to the new, such as gene editing, researchers are trying to help plant breeders and backyard gardeners alike stay one step ahead of the changing planet.
It’s a tall task. What felt hot 20 years ago is now commonplace, says Joan Bonany, a pomologist at the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology outside Barcelona who helped form the Hot Climate Partnership. Memories of being able to comfortably walk between his tidy rows of apple and pear trees “stretch further and further back in time,” he says, and preempting the future “is very much like shooting a moving target.”
