A worldwide coffee shortage is looming — not in a far-off, dystopian future, but now. Scientists are producing alarming findings that climate change is affecting both the quantity and quality of coffee beans.
Research published by The Climate Institute in Sydney, Australia, has reported on climate change’s devastating effects on coffee crops and a projected shortage in the commodity’s future.
According to the report, climate change is contributing to a worldwide coffee shortage in three ways.
“Around the Bean Belt, rising minimum growing temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns, and rising pest and disease incidence, are already making life harder for coffee farmers,” said the report’s author, Corey Watts, a former policy and science projects manager at The Climate Institute.
The most popular varietal of coffee bean is grown in tropical highlands, where ideal temperatures are between 64 degrees and 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
If consistent temperatures were to rise above 73 degrees, bean quality and crop health would suffer significantly.
The rising temperatures have led to another extreme and erratic climate change in coffee-growing regions: droughts and downpours.
Drought was responsible for destroying a third of Brazil’s coffee crop in 2014.
Heavy rains and warmer temperatures have led to rise in crop disease and pest population.
Coffee leaf rust is a fungus that has wreaked havoc on Central American and South American coffee yields as it has flourished in a warmer, wetter region. In 2012, the plant disease reportedly decimated as much as 85 percent of Guatemala’s coffee crop.
The population of coffee berry borer pests has exploded throughout the so-called Bean Belt from its native Congo. Steamier conditions have not only driven the borer out wider, but higher.
According to the report, the borer was now found nearly a thousand feet higher on Mount Kilimanjaro than where it was recorded last century.
Climate change impacts are projected, according to the report, to halve the global area suitable for coffee production by 2050.
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