Greece's most iconic crop is under pressure

Greece's most iconic crop is under pressure. And the data is hard to ignore.

Greece has been producing olive oil for over 5,000 years. Today, the olive grove is not just agriculture. It is identity, livelihood, and landscape.

Climate change is reshaping all three.

The 2023/24 season delivered a historically low national yield of around 120,000 tonnes. A partial rebound followed in 2024/25, reaching 250,000 tonnes. But that is still well below the 330,000+ tonnes recorded in 2022/23. And some forecasters are now projecting another sharp drop for the current season.

One producer and miller in Chalkidiki put it plainly: "We have not seen a substantial olive oil yield in our area for four years due to the consistently warming and dry weather."

The causes are converging. Severe hailstorms and torrential rain devastated olive groves across multiple regions in 2025, compounding losses already driven by drought, warming temperatures, and decreased precipitation.

Science is confirming what farmers are living. A 2025 study published in Communications Earth & Environment, drawing on 8,000 years of olive pollen data, found that olive yields are increasingly threatened by intensifying water stress and shifting photosynthetic conditions across the eastern Mediterranean. Separately, new Greek research under the MINERVA project is modelling how heat stress events, consecutive dry years, and disrupted flowering conditions are projected to compound across both moderate and high-emission scenarios.

According to the head of the Agricultural Olive Oil Cooperative of Kalamata: "The climate impacts were so intense that it almost destroyed all our production. We don't have the weapons to fight this problem."

That last sentence is the real challenge. Not science. Not even the weather. The absence of tools, systems, and strategies to adapt at the farm level, at scale, in time.

This is why Greece needs a serious national conversation on climate adaptation in agriculture. Not later. Now.

At Climate Change Changing Greece, this is exactly the kind of intersection we work on. Between science and practice. Between global trends and local realities. Between what is happening and what we can still do about it.

The olive tree has survived millennia. With the right support, it can survive this too.

Sources

• Olive Oil Times – Extreme weather ravages olive groves across Greece, undermining 2025 output

• Communications Earth & Environment (Nature) – 8,000 years of olive pollen data and climate threats to olive yields (2025)

• EGU General Assembly 2025 (NASA ADS) – MINERVA project: projected climate stress on Greek olive cultivation

• Bloomberg – The 2025 olive oil crisis in Greece

• The National Herald – Drought, fruit fly will hold down Greece’s olive oil production