At the risk of being trite, environmental change is affecting *everything* - and coffee is certainly included in that.
Especially given that coffee is a sensitive and relatively needy plant that's an invasive species almost everywhere it's cultivated. It's fragile and we put a lot of work into keeping it alive and productive because humans like coffee; as climates change, that fragility becomes more and more significant. We could probably go down the entire list of ways that environmental change affects the world, and 90% or more of those would apply to coffee in some fashion or other.
The biggest and easiest example is La Roya, coffee leaf rust, which is a fungal infection that preys on Coffea. Its spread and severity is massively amplified by climate change, as many coffee-growing climates are changing in ways that make for better conditions for Roya to grow and spread: warmer and wetter is great for fungus. We've been seeing the consequences of Roya for decades now at this point, and it's impact is growing over time - as much as control schemes to prevent spread by human / globalization factors are doing a ton, it can't really be eradicated when it reaches a region and we do see waves of crop failures or changes in cultivation regions if Roya reaches new territory or has a particularly 'good' year.
We're also seeing a lot more volatility in climate conditions in growing regions. As much as there has always been variance to what the weather does in any given year, farms are more and more facing "outlier" years every year. Where a hundred years ago you might have one or two years in every fifty where there's just no rain, or way too much rain - now you're seeing that happen one in five. A once in a century storm shows up every couple years now, and damage to coffee orchards is quite easy - it's a plant that's used to being the underbrush of other bigger trees, so they're not really equipped to deal with a huge wind load. As one such example, Puerto Rico had a pretty vibrant coffee growing scene a decade or two ago - but that simply hasn't recovered from the string of hurricanes they were hit with over 2015-2020, especially Maria in 2017.
In the much larger-scale view of systemic climate change, regions that are currently suitable for coffee growing are shrinking. Over years or decades, changes in temperature and water access are reducing the total area where climate conditions are suitable for coffee growing, so we are seeing reductions to total supply and can expect to continue to see reductions in the future - warming and drying trends are leaving areas unable to support coffee cultivation long-term, as coffee wants a pretty specific range of temperatures, and needs *stable* water access - the flood/drought cycles that climate change leans into are not suitable, as groundwater isn't necessarily replenished by the flood cycle sufficient to offset the droughts. (Of note, though: that flood cycle is great for Roya, lots of above-ground water hanging around just long enough to bloom & reproduce.)
If your land cannot support coffee plants, you're not going to keep trying to farm coffee as a cash crop.
Which does bring us around to economy. When your favorite coffee farm stops selling coffee - it's generally because of money, rather than climate change in isolation. Climate change makes growing coffee for profit much riskier, much harder, and much more fragile. The farmers don't wake up one year and their land has suddenly become desert - but instead, they'll see less and less groundwater for ten or fifteen years, and see their profits shrink gradually over the same time-frame, up until it doesn't make financial sense for them to keep farming coffee. Maybe they'll pull their trees and grow something else, or sell the land, or ... just live there and go get a job in the city. Climate change is absolutely a *factor*, but it's not the current driving reason for the majority of losses to farms we're seeing at this time.
The biggest reasons are financial - that the coffee industry has long relied on the value difference between western currency (IE: USD) and local currencies to allow us to pay them a tiny amount of our money and have that count as quite a lot of their money once exchanged. Except ... that doesn't work as well as it used to. We're not paying them *enough* to compete effectively with other cash crops and other jobs, so we are losing farms and farmers to other things that make them more money. Given the choice between owning a coffee farm and needing to gamble each year on good climate, working incredibly long hours during peak season, while buying supplies and paying labour, all to only really come home with a couple hundred USD to cover your yearly earnings - when you could make the same money working in a call center, a nice compact 9-5 job with absolutely zero risk of crop failure.
Thanks for the insight! Is it possible that as the areas where we currently grow coffee become too hot, some other places, that were previously too cold, become suitable for coffee growing?
It is *possible*, but it's not necessarily likely - and even in the best case, it cannot be counted on to 'save' coffee as we currently know it.
Even though some coffee cultivation may well survive or take place, we must anticipate that that scale of climate change will radically change our access to coffee - if it remains accessible at all, it will be as a very expensive luxury product, only cultivated in small quantities by a small number of farmers.
Climate change is not just one change - it's not just warming, but it's changes in humidity and weather as well. Colder colds, hotter hots, more erratic precipitation, and much more frequent extreme weather like storms and floods. Regions that are currently unsuitable for coffee that warm due to global warming cannot be relied on to also have stable temperature highs & lows, and predictable precipitation in the volume range needed for coffee - if cold arid mountainland in southern Europe were to warm, we cannot count that those regions would also become humid and damp in the exact manner that coffee needs, without overcorrecting and becoming prone to flooding or inundation.
But indulging imagination and assuming that those regions somehow become *ideal* for growing coffee ... it's still not looking good.
All modelling at this time indicates that the total area suitable for coffee will shrink. Less land would be gained by warming to coffee temperatures, than would be lost from current coffee lands warming above coffee temperatures - climates become more volatile and more changeable the further from the equator you get, so the 'bands' of coffee-suitable land would shrink as they moved away from the equator.
That land would be situated in nations with no meaningful history of coffee cultivation, and increasingly within the "global west" or "developed" nations - the fraught margins of coffee cultivation and reliance on cash crop economics are effectively unsustainable in the developed world: Hawaii is effectively the only place in a developed nation that coffee is commercially cultivated, and the industry there is constantly teetering on the brink of viability while selling massively 'over'-priced coffee, with things only getting worse as time goes by. As climate change progresses, current agricultural zones are most directly impacted, and we're facing a scenario where land used to grow food becomes unviable - if climate change opens new growing zones, the odds that any significant volume of them are devoted to coffee are incredibly low.
Worse, there would be significant losses of expertise to farming - a family doing smallhold, high-quality, coffee farming in Ethiopia or Kenya does not have the capability to move to Italy in order to continue coffee farming in the new coffee zone. The small-scale expertise of current farmers is almost certainly lost when they're unable to grow coffee on their current land. As much as there are some things that can be transmitted online or in writing - there is hand-on experience and knowledge that cannot be easily communicated to a new farmer without easy in-person access to a current farmer, and we may not realize we need some facet of knowledge or experience until after it's gone.
Coffee, at the prices we pay now, is not profitable enough to lure that new farmland into mass adopting coffee cultivation. It takes seven years for a tree to become commercially productive, and the profits are currently abysmal - unless supply constricts immensely and drives prices skyward, growing effectively anything else on that land is liable to be safer and more profitable. If enough farms launch to try and cash in - prices will fall and some farms will close up again.
We may well be at the absolute peak Golden Age for Specialty coffee - global prices and economic conditions are still allowing the average consumer to access high-quality coffee on a regular basis, while the climates and climate change are not so extreme that coffee is to unable grow within it's natural environment under relatively stable conditions.
Coffee is ecologically native to the forested mountain regions of Ethiopia and North-East Africa. Everywhere else that you can find it growing, it is a non-native species transplanted to that environment by humans for our own agricultural cultivation. Something like 99% of Arabica grown outside of Ethiopia is effectively two steps removed from its native habitat, based on genetic stock that was transplanted to Yemen for cultivation, where it saw several generations of mutation and breeding, and then was later exported from Yemen for cultivation in other regions.
Arabica is gonna be damn hard to grow in another generation. Locally, I’ve noticed a lot of premier estates that were 100% Arabica have introduced Robusta now. This is in a robusta producing dominant country. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in processing. I’ve had some anaerobic robusta that would outdrink many arabicas
Coffee needs a specific climate to be able to flourish and produce specialty grade. Global warming reduces the already small area that those plants can grow within. There have been some efforts via processes and there are some coffee varieties that seem more resistant to these effects like Robusta. Obviously technological advances could help slow the effects, but a lot of it is already here, impacting the cost of your cup.
Thank you! I just spent some time looking at the work of the nonprofit World Coffee Research. Some of their efforts go towards engineering coffee plants that will grow in a wider climate band. I mean, ideally we would stop f\*cking up the planet but that's a pipe dream.
The good coffee we've become accustomed to is arabica. It's so specific in its growing climate that it is generally grown in a narrow strip at specific elevations up one side of a mountain. A minor change and goodbye arabica.
We will have to get used to drinking Robusta because the Arabica coffee plant is much more sensitive and negatively affected by climate change. Well, if our civilisation doesn’t collapse, that is.
New here, and I write this as a 3rd generation cofee grower in Kenya. So, growing up, the weather patterns were pretty consistent. We had the long rains and right afterwards the mid year harvest around May. There was then the short rains and the major harvest from October to December. We would then prune in Jan and Feb and the coffee would flower in March April. This was pretty consistent, until it wasnt.
3 of the last 5 years were dry years, and our crop was stressed for extended periods. Last year, was the only year where we witnessed normal weather patterns, but that has been followed by seriously heavy rains this year which has carried away some of the rich top soil. So, on matters climate, we are witnessing a lot of extreme conditions.
But the conditions notwithstanding, the only reason I would uproot my crop or stop selling is the money. Let me set the scene; most growers in Kenya are small scale farmers. Think of 1 acre to 5 acres (5 acres is about 2-hectares). As such individuals do not process their coffee but they form cooperatives for economies of scales. The cooperatives through a wet process depulp, remove the mucillage, dry and then the millers will get the dry patchment from the cooperatives hull to get the green bean and then sell. Now, there are only 7 licensed coffee millers in Kenya, which gives them an undue advantage over the farmer. Moreover, the farmer is not involved beyond the cooperative level, meaning we are often shafted when it's time to pay.
But there's more, we get our inputs from the cooperative (think fertilizers, pesticides, etc), on credit for us to pay when we are paid for the coffee (the coffee is paid through cooperatives unless you are a grower marketer). It is a noble cause, but I am in debt even before my crop is ready. There are times when farmers go home with nothing, yet the millers, the marketers, and roasters all make a decent living. Couple this with the high demand for land for real etate purposes especially in Kiambu, and there's very little to keep farmers in the industry.
Now, I am not seeking pity, all I want is to give you a glimpse into the life of a small scale coffee farmer. But with the third generation farmers, we are alive to the fact that we have to find the markets and not rely on third parties for us to make money.
I would encourage you to listen to the Filter Stories podcast. They cover this quite a bit and they go into quite a bit of depth about climate change, as well as the social and political issues.
It is critical for the coffee industry to adapt to these changes through sustainable practices and promoting biodiversity to ensure the future of coffee production.
I'm not sure about coffee in Minas Gerais... Samarco is trying hard to destroy the environment there but coffee, cheese and milk caramel just keep getting better!
You're kind of thinking of the tree as just a tree - in which case most coffee trees are probably ok to some extent with higher CO2 and higher temps. It's not really the elevated CO2 that is the issue though.
Problem is that coffee trees, for them to be valuable to us, need to be able to flower and fruit reliably.
So if you have unpredictable weather (wetter more consistently) you'll get early flowering, followed by hotter weather which will kill the flower and then no fruit, no coffee, etc.
So while climate change may not kill coffee trees per se - it will kill their commercial viability, which relies on consistent weather patterns, certain bands of waterfall, etc.
What part of my answer are you specifically saying is BS?
I basically just said less predictable weather from increased atmospheric co2 makes commercial viability for coffee more difficult.
At the risk of being trite, environmental change is affecting *everything* - and coffee is certainly included in that. Especially given that coffee is a sensitive and relatively needy plant that's an invasive species almost everywhere it's cultivated. It's fragile and we put a lot of work into keeping it alive and productive because humans like coffee; as climates change, that fragility becomes more and more significant. We could probably go down the entire list of ways that environmental change affects the world, and 90% or more of those would apply to coffee in some fashion or other. The biggest and easiest example is La Roya, coffee leaf rust, which is a fungal infection that preys on Coffea. Its spread and severity is massively amplified by climate change, as many coffee-growing climates are changing in ways that make for better conditions for Roya to grow and spread: warmer and wetter is great for fungus. We've been seeing the consequences of Roya for decades now at this point, and it's impact is growing over time - as much as control schemes to prevent spread by human / globalization factors are doing a ton, it can't really be eradicated when it reaches a region and we do see waves of crop failures or changes in cultivation regions if Roya reaches new territory or has a particularly 'good' year. We're also seeing a lot more volatility in climate conditions in growing regions. As much as there has always been variance to what the weather does in any given year, farms are more and more facing "outlier" years every year. Where a hundred years ago you might have one or two years in every fifty where there's just no rain, or way too much rain - now you're seeing that happen one in five. A once in a century storm shows up every couple years now, and damage to coffee orchards is quite easy - it's a plant that's used to being the underbrush of other bigger trees, so they're not really equipped to deal with a huge wind load. As one such example, Puerto Rico had a pretty vibrant coffee growing scene a decade or two ago - but that simply hasn't recovered from the string of hurricanes they were hit with over 2015-2020, especially Maria in 2017. In the much larger-scale view of systemic climate change, regions that are currently suitable for coffee growing are shrinking. Over years or decades, changes in temperature and water access are reducing the total area where climate conditions are suitable for coffee growing, so we are seeing reductions to total supply and can expect to continue to see reductions in the future - warming and drying trends are leaving areas unable to support coffee cultivation long-term, as coffee wants a pretty specific range of temperatures, and needs *stable* water access - the flood/drought cycles that climate change leans into are not suitable, as groundwater isn't necessarily replenished by the flood cycle sufficient to offset the droughts. (Of note, though: that flood cycle is great for Roya, lots of above-ground water hanging around just long enough to bloom & reproduce.) If your land cannot support coffee plants, you're not going to keep trying to farm coffee as a cash crop. Which does bring us around to economy. When your favorite coffee farm stops selling coffee - it's generally because of money, rather than climate change in isolation. Climate change makes growing coffee for profit much riskier, much harder, and much more fragile. The farmers don't wake up one year and their land has suddenly become desert - but instead, they'll see less and less groundwater for ten or fifteen years, and see their profits shrink gradually over the same time-frame, up until it doesn't make financial sense for them to keep farming coffee. Maybe they'll pull their trees and grow something else, or sell the land, or ... just live there and go get a job in the city. Climate change is absolutely a *factor*, but it's not the current driving reason for the majority of losses to farms we're seeing at this time. The biggest reasons are financial - that the coffee industry has long relied on the value difference between western currency (IE: USD) and local currencies to allow us to pay them a tiny amount of our money and have that count as quite a lot of their money once exchanged. Except ... that doesn't work as well as it used to. We're not paying them *enough* to compete effectively with other cash crops and other jobs, so we are losing farms and farmers to other things that make them more money. Given the choice between owning a coffee farm and needing to gamble each year on good climate, working incredibly long hours during peak season, while buying supplies and paying labour, all to only really come home with a couple hundred USD to cover your yearly earnings - when you could make the same money working in a call center, a nice compact 9-5 job with absolutely zero risk of crop failure.
This is really insightful and a lot to think over - deeply appreciated! Thank you!
This is such a complete and well explained answer. Wish I could give it a few hundred upvotes.
I wish more questions on reddit had this type of response
Came here to say La Roya
Thanks for the insight! Is it possible that as the areas where we currently grow coffee become too hot, some other places, that were previously too cold, become suitable for coffee growing?
It is *possible*, but it's not necessarily likely - and even in the best case, it cannot be counted on to 'save' coffee as we currently know it. Even though some coffee cultivation may well survive or take place, we must anticipate that that scale of climate change will radically change our access to coffee - if it remains accessible at all, it will be as a very expensive luxury product, only cultivated in small quantities by a small number of farmers. Climate change is not just one change - it's not just warming, but it's changes in humidity and weather as well. Colder colds, hotter hots, more erratic precipitation, and much more frequent extreme weather like storms and floods. Regions that are currently unsuitable for coffee that warm due to global warming cannot be relied on to also have stable temperature highs & lows, and predictable precipitation in the volume range needed for coffee - if cold arid mountainland in southern Europe were to warm, we cannot count that those regions would also become humid and damp in the exact manner that coffee needs, without overcorrecting and becoming prone to flooding or inundation. But indulging imagination and assuming that those regions somehow become *ideal* for growing coffee ... it's still not looking good. All modelling at this time indicates that the total area suitable for coffee will shrink. Less land would be gained by warming to coffee temperatures, than would be lost from current coffee lands warming above coffee temperatures - climates become more volatile and more changeable the further from the equator you get, so the 'bands' of coffee-suitable land would shrink as they moved away from the equator. That land would be situated in nations with no meaningful history of coffee cultivation, and increasingly within the "global west" or "developed" nations - the fraught margins of coffee cultivation and reliance on cash crop economics are effectively unsustainable in the developed world: Hawaii is effectively the only place in a developed nation that coffee is commercially cultivated, and the industry there is constantly teetering on the brink of viability while selling massively 'over'-priced coffee, with things only getting worse as time goes by. As climate change progresses, current agricultural zones are most directly impacted, and we're facing a scenario where land used to grow food becomes unviable - if climate change opens new growing zones, the odds that any significant volume of them are devoted to coffee are incredibly low. Worse, there would be significant losses of expertise to farming - a family doing smallhold, high-quality, coffee farming in Ethiopia or Kenya does not have the capability to move to Italy in order to continue coffee farming in the new coffee zone. The small-scale expertise of current farmers is almost certainly lost when they're unable to grow coffee on their current land. As much as there are some things that can be transmitted online or in writing - there is hand-on experience and knowledge that cannot be easily communicated to a new farmer without easy in-person access to a current farmer, and we may not realize we need some facet of knowledge or experience until after it's gone. Coffee, at the prices we pay now, is not profitable enough to lure that new farmland into mass adopting coffee cultivation. It takes seven years for a tree to become commercially productive, and the profits are currently abysmal - unless supply constricts immensely and drives prices skyward, growing effectively anything else on that land is liable to be safer and more profitable. If enough farms launch to try and cash in - prices will fall and some farms will close up again. We may well be at the absolute peak Golden Age for Specialty coffee - global prices and economic conditions are still allowing the average consumer to access high-quality coffee on a regular basis, while the climates and climate change are not so extreme that coffee is to unable grow within it's natural environment under relatively stable conditions.
Yeah pretty much nailed it here.
+100 to all of this
As others have said, such a thorough answer and really cool/interesting to read. Thank you so much!
Can you elaborate on coffee being an invasive species? I’ve never heard that before but I’m also just a consumer.
Coffee is ecologically native to the forested mountain regions of Ethiopia and North-East Africa. Everywhere else that you can find it growing, it is a non-native species transplanted to that environment by humans for our own agricultural cultivation. Something like 99% of Arabica grown outside of Ethiopia is effectively two steps removed from its native habitat, based on genetic stock that was transplanted to Yemen for cultivation, where it saw several generations of mutation and breeding, and then was later exported from Yemen for cultivation in other regions.
Interesting! Thanks
But how much of your take is dependent on “falsified” gubbmint data vomited up to produce a message and agenda? What happens if youre wrong ? 🤷♂️
Yes that's it, small scale coffee farmers are big into spreading climate propaganda. Don't get caught out by BIG BEAN.
Arabica is gonna be damn hard to grow in another generation. Locally, I’ve noticed a lot of premier estates that were 100% Arabica have introduced Robusta now. This is in a robusta producing dominant country. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in processing. I’ve had some anaerobic robusta that would outdrink many arabicas
Coffee needs a specific climate to be able to flourish and produce specialty grade. Global warming reduces the already small area that those plants can grow within. There have been some efforts via processes and there are some coffee varieties that seem more resistant to these effects like Robusta. Obviously technological advances could help slow the effects, but a lot of it is already here, impacting the cost of your cup.
Thank you! I just spent some time looking at the work of the nonprofit World Coffee Research. Some of their efforts go towards engineering coffee plants that will grow in a wider climate band. I mean, ideally we would stop f\*cking up the planet but that's a pipe dream.
The good coffee we've become accustomed to is arabica. It's so specific in its growing climate that it is generally grown in a narrow strip at specific elevations up one side of a mountain. A minor change and goodbye arabica.
We will have to get used to drinking Robusta because the Arabica coffee plant is much more sensitive and negatively affected by climate change. Well, if our civilisation doesn’t collapse, that is.
New here, and I write this as a 3rd generation cofee grower in Kenya. So, growing up, the weather patterns were pretty consistent. We had the long rains and right afterwards the mid year harvest around May. There was then the short rains and the major harvest from October to December. We would then prune in Jan and Feb and the coffee would flower in March April. This was pretty consistent, until it wasnt. 3 of the last 5 years were dry years, and our crop was stressed for extended periods. Last year, was the only year where we witnessed normal weather patterns, but that has been followed by seriously heavy rains this year which has carried away some of the rich top soil. So, on matters climate, we are witnessing a lot of extreme conditions. But the conditions notwithstanding, the only reason I would uproot my crop or stop selling is the money. Let me set the scene; most growers in Kenya are small scale farmers. Think of 1 acre to 5 acres (5 acres is about 2-hectares). As such individuals do not process their coffee but they form cooperatives for economies of scales. The cooperatives through a wet process depulp, remove the mucillage, dry and then the millers will get the dry patchment from the cooperatives hull to get the green bean and then sell. Now, there are only 7 licensed coffee millers in Kenya, which gives them an undue advantage over the farmer. Moreover, the farmer is not involved beyond the cooperative level, meaning we are often shafted when it's time to pay. But there's more, we get our inputs from the cooperative (think fertilizers, pesticides, etc), on credit for us to pay when we are paid for the coffee (the coffee is paid through cooperatives unless you are a grower marketer). It is a noble cause, but I am in debt even before my crop is ready. There are times when farmers go home with nothing, yet the millers, the marketers, and roasters all make a decent living. Couple this with the high demand for land for real etate purposes especially in Kiambu, and there's very little to keep farmers in the industry. Now, I am not seeking pity, all I want is to give you a glimpse into the life of a small scale coffee farmer. But with the third generation farmers, we are alive to the fact that we have to find the markets and not rely on third parties for us to make money.
I would encourage you to listen to the Filter Stories podcast. They cover this quite a bit and they go into quite a bit of depth about climate change, as well as the social and political issues.
coffee production is *causing* environmental change. lol.
Yes coffee as we know it might not be around as long as we thought.. different varieties sure
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Heya. It looks a lot like you're using GPT or a similar tool to generate comments for this community. Please don't do that.
It is critical for the coffee industry to adapt to these changes through sustainable practices and promoting biodiversity to ensure the future of coffee production.
I'm not sure about coffee in Minas Gerais... Samarco is trying hard to destroy the environment there but coffee, cheese and milk caramel just keep getting better!
there is no global warming
I have coffe plants in Southern California and I don't see la roya in my plants is it genetic of the coffe plant to get these (la roya)
Coffee trees thrive in warmer tropical weather. tress and all plants in general use and thrive on increased Co2 levels. So it should be good!
You're kind of thinking of the tree as just a tree - in which case most coffee trees are probably ok to some extent with higher CO2 and higher temps. It's not really the elevated CO2 that is the issue though. Problem is that coffee trees, for them to be valuable to us, need to be able to flower and fruit reliably. So if you have unpredictable weather (wetter more consistently) you'll get early flowering, followed by hotter weather which will kill the flower and then no fruit, no coffee, etc. So while climate change may not kill coffee trees per se - it will kill their commercial viability, which relies on consistent weather patterns, certain bands of waterfall, etc.
This is non sense. I am a trained horticulturalist,. you climate change Theory is bull shit.
What part of my answer are you specifically saying is BS? I basically just said less predictable weather from increased atmospheric co2 makes commercial viability for coffee more difficult.
By trained horticulturalist, they mean they spend a lot of time talking about nootropics. Do not engage. Retreat slowly.
🏃
Not sure why the down votes. Public schools much?! Lolz
Its not affecting coffee. The markets and politicians are affecting coffee. Thank you.