If you like your morning cup of coffee, you are hardly alone. Some 2.25 billion cups of coffee are sipped and gobbled down daily around the planet. Nor are you alone in potentially losing your favorite cups of coffee because of a usual suspect: climate change.
According to a recently published report appropriately titled “A Brewing Storm” and produced by the Climate Institute in Australia, coffee crops worldwide are set to plunge in the face of warming temperatures. And by “plunge” we mean precipitously. Coffee production could plummet by a staggering 50% in coming decades. That would of course mean a significant rise in the price of coffee, which currently underpins a US$19 billion industry.
“[B]y 2050, we might see as much as a 50 per cent decline in productivity and production of coffee around the world, which is not so good,” said Molly Harriss Olson, chief executive of Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand, which commissioned the report.
“Not so good” is a bit of an understatement. It’s positively awful. Coffee plants are famously heat-sensitive and rising temperatures may well harm hugely popular Coffea Arabica plants, which produce the world’s most aromatic beans. Arabica plants are cultivated widely in the famous “Bean Belt,” which girds the tropics and encompasses Brazil, Ethiopia, and Vietnam, among other countries. Arabica trees grow well at around 23 degrees Celsius but begin to suffer at higher temperatures.
And local temperatures at several places where the plants are cultivated on hillsides have already shot by up to 1.3 degrees Celsius. Tanzania, where coffee production is a major part of the local economy, has seen coffee yields almost halve already over the past half century. Coffee plants, which are genetically vulnerable, are also at increasing risk of succumbing to new diseases like coffee rust and to pests like a beetle called the coffee berry borer.
Aware of the dangers, coffee cultivators are fighting back by seeking to save coffee. The measures include setting up a gene bank for preserving the genetic diversity of Arabica coffee and trying to breed new varieties of coffee that can withstand both higher temperatures and invasive pests.
But we can all do something to help coffee plants … by helping the planet. Singly and collectively, we will need to decrease our carbon emissions significantly so Earth can set about healing itself.
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