Italy's Cheese Banks Melt as Climate Disrupts Alpine Dairy Traditions

Northern Italy's distinctive 'cheese banks' — institutions that accept wheels of ageing Parmigiano-Reggiano as loan collateral — are confronting a climate problem their founders never modelled: rising and increasingly erratic temperatures are affecting the caves and controlled-atmosphere warehouses where cheese matures for 12 to 36 months. Heat spikes damage rind integrity and alter fermentation chemistry, increasing spoilage rates and undermining the actuarial assumptions on which cheese-backed loans are built.

The mechanism at work is the intersection of climate variability with a food system deliberately designed around stability. Parmigiano-Reggiano's protected designation of origin (PDO) rules require production within a specific geographic zone, from cows fed specific feed, using methods unchanged for centuries — precisely the rigidity that makes it a reliable store of value, and precisely the vulnerability that climate variability exploits. Producers cannot simply move to cooler areas or substitute inputs without losing the PDO certification that commands the price premium.

Watch whether the Parmigiano-Reggiano Consortium requests an official review of PDO geographic boundaries — a precedent that would cascade across Europe's 3,000+ protected food designations, forcing a reckoning between cultural preservation of traditional food systems and the agricultural adaptations that climate change demands.