Not All Doom And Gloom

Climate change is having an effect of the world of coffee – but not in the way you might expect, as James Hansen reports

- James Hansen

When Kew Gardens botanist Aaron P Davis first visited Ethiopia, in 2013, the senior government official who met him was blunt. “We don’t want an academic fantasy. We need something practical. We need something useful.”

The cause of the official’s concern was climate change. Typing “coffee climate change” into the search engine of your choice will produce an abundance of terrible scenarios: whole species will die out, coffee-producing countries will be ravaged, the world will run out of coffee.

But while it would be naïve to say the future won’t be challenging for coffee producing nations as global temperatures rise, it is also overly simplistic to say that climate change will mean nothing more than an inexorable decline.

Aaron and his Kew team chose Ethiopia to challenge these perceptions for several reasons. The country is Africa’s largest coffee producer, with an officially estimated 525,000 hectares planted, although the real figure is likely to be closer to four times that amount. In 2014/15, the year following initial research on the project, Ethiopia produced 180,000 metric tonnes (180 million kilos) of coffee. In 2015/16, that increased to 384,000 tonnes, of which 222,000 tonnes was consumed in Ethiopia itself. It’s also the cultural and biological home of coffee, with the widest natural biodiversity of any country when it comes to coffee varietals. A strong research methodology, intelligently applied, would have further reaching positive implications for other coffee-producing countries than would have been possible in a country with less diversity of both terroir and plant.

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