Our industrial society is underpinned by drug use, though we don't typically think of it as such. After all, two out of three Americans drink coffee daily, according to the National Coffee Association. The American coffee market is expected to exceed $28 billion in 2024 and the industry creates 2.2 million jobs a year, which in turn generates more than $100 billion in wages for employees.
But just try to imagine a world without coffee in the office breakroom or the long lines wrapping around Dutch Bros. Yet as unthinkable as it may seem, climate change could craft a future in which coffee disappears, or at least becomes far more scarce and expensive.
Experts in this area seem to agree on two things: Climate change is going to make it harder to produce coffee, and coffee production in turn actually worsens the problems of climate change. Jarrod Kath, a professor of agriculture and environmental science at the University of Queensland who has studied coffee and temperature variability, elaborated on how global warming will negatively impact coffee production. Specifically, Kath focused on the two species of plants used to make coffee — Arabica and robusta — and how each one responds differently to rising temperatures.
"Robusta coffee is generally thought to be able withstand hotter conditions better than Arabica," Kath told Salon by email, adding that he has previously researched the question of how much better it will be. The conventional wisdom holds that robusta needs an optimal temperature range above 22°C to thrive, but Kath's research has found that those people "are likely overestimating its suitable production range and its ability to contribute to coffee production as temperatures increase under climate change. Robusta supplies 40% of the world's coffee, but its production potential could decline considerably as temperatures increase under climate change, jeopardizing a multi-billion dollar coffee industry and the livelihoods of millions of farmers.”
Similarly, Kath and his team did research on Arabica coffee and discovered that "it is highly sensitive to the air getting drier and hotter." After Kath and his scientists measured the dryness and heat of the air, they learned that "once you reach a critical threshold of vapour pressure deficit that Arabica coffee yields decline rapidly. Several Arabica areas under climate change may see rapid yield declines under climate change."
"I think that coffee serves as a ‘canary in the mine’ of environmental change."
In addition to making coffee more scarce, climate change has also put a target over the coffee industry for a different reason — the fact that it leaves a massive carbon footprint which exacerbates global warming. Amanda McMillan Lequieu, a professor of environmental sociology at Drexel University who has also studied coffee and climate change, elaborated on the nature of coffee's worrying (but elusive) carbon footprint.
"There are many ways to produce coffee, so it's difficult to summarize exactly how much carbon coffee production inmates," Lequieu wrote to Salon. "We do know that the production processes tend to make up 40 to 80% of the total greenhouse gas emissions affiliated with coffee as a commodity. This is because the growth of coffee plants can often be associated with removing other habitats, and with the mechanization of certain components of the harvesting, cleaning, and those two process require some fossil fuel energy, and perhaps most significantly, transportation contributes significantly to the carbon emissions for most tropical commodities consumed in the global north."
Lequieu added, "To be clear, other forms of consumption — say, of meat — contributes more significantly to greenhouse gas emissions than coffee does. Zooming out further, industrial-scale transportation and fossil fuel extraction and usage are the most significant contributors overall."
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"It is the poorer coffee farmers that don’t have the resources and capacity to adapt that will face the greatest challenges."
There is one other way in which climate change negatively impacts the coffee industry — by harming the livelihoods of those who depend on it.
"This is my opinion, not based on my research, but my discussion with those I word with in the coffee industry suggest that those with enough resources (e.g. money to invest in irrigation) to adapt to climate change may be fine," Kath told Salon. "It is the poorer coffee farmers that don’t have the resources and capacity to adapt that will face the greatest challenges. If the climate becomes more unfavorable, they may no longer be able to produce high enough yields to make a living income from coffee production. The flow on effects of this at scale and for coffee supply more generally I don’t think are well understood, or at least quantified."
"Under these circumstances," David Kuhn, the lead for corporate resilience at the World Wildlife Fund, pointed out, "it’s important that we examine the whole system while also engaging with local communities to implement solutions that put people and nature at the center of a long-term vision for healthy landscapes. This includes significantly scaling up investments in adaptation and resilience for our communities and nature."
"They are being impacted by climate change now, and the longer we wait, the harder and more expensive it’s going to get," he added.
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As Kuhn also noted, coffee and humans are alike in that they "depend on a healthy environment to survive and thrive." This is demonstrated in the case of coffee by the fact that "the coffee plant requires certain conditions to grow and produce high-quality fruit; the right temperature, the right precipitation, the right soil and all at the right time.
Coffee is also impacted by pests. Climate change is shifting all of this, making things more uncertain, making management decision-making harder and more expensive for producers and putting more stress on the plants and resources."
Lequieu said the coffee and climate change crisis involve far more than the fate of this particular beverage.
"I think that coffee serves as a ‘canary in the mine’ of environmental change," Lequieu told Salon, explaining that this was a key reason why she and one of her students decided to write an article studying it. "Even those of us who feel particularly alienated from where our food comes from often, on a daily basis, interact directly with the fruit of this tropical plant. Even if the quantity of coffee available to everyday consumers doesn't change much initially, as climate change might enable coffee to be grown in other regions of the world when a warming climate creates amenable weather patterns beyond the Equatorial region, we wanted to draw attention to the very real people who will be impacted by coffees decline in traditional growing regions."
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