Climate change has been damaging coffee-growing regions for past 40 years

Sat, 11 Mar, 2023 - 12:04

Pádraig Hoare, Environment Correspondent

Climate change has been damaging coffee-growing regions for at least the last 40 years and this will only get worse.

Bolstering claims by Fairtrade Ireland this month that by 2050 coffee could be a precious commodity only for the wealthy, an independent study found that the hazards and extreme events of climate change increased in 12 regions between 1980 and 2020.

The study, published in PLOS Climate, by Doug Richardson, at the Australian government agency Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), examined how the likes of the El Niño weather phenomenon cause crop failures.

El Niño refers to warming of the ocean surface, or above-average sea-surface temperatures, in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, causing higher than normal temperatures. The last three winters have seen the opposite, La Niña cooling periods.

Even with these three cooling periods, the last eight years have been the hottest on record combined, with heatwaves shattering temperature records across Europe last summer. Meteorologists have warned of even higher temperatures when El Niño returns, as expected, later this year.

The CSIRO researchers analysed climate hazards and so-called compound events in coffee-producing regions from 1980 to 2020. Compound events, when discussed in climate change, refer to bad weather and climate events coming together, such as drought or storms.

They identified 12 climate hazards that threaten coffee crops in the top 12 coffee-producing countries, such as the daily maximum temperature that coffee plants can tolerate being exceeded.

The type of hazards have shifted from overly cool conditions to overly warm, they said, adding that more research is needed to understand what kind of adaptations might mitigate global coffee crop failures. The authors said:

With climate change projections showing a continued rise in temperatures in the tropics likely, we posit that coffee production can expect ongoing systemic shocks.

Fairtrade Ireland turned heads earlier this month when it warned that coffee beans, cocoa, and other foods grown in hotter climates could become rare and expensive treats within the next 30 years because of extreme weather events.

Fairtrade Ireland executive director, Peter Gaynor, said: "We could be looking at the end of the much-loved cup of coffee.

"Farmers who grow coffee beans are experiencing serious challenges due to many extreme weather events, such as in Kenya, East Africa, which is right now experiencing its worst drought on-record.

"A worrying 93% of the Fairtrade coffee farmers in Kenya surveyed are already experiencing the effects of climate change. By 2050, it is estimated up to half of the world’s land currently used to farm coffee may be unusable due to floods, droughts and increased temperatures."

Irish consumers have already felt the ripple effect of failed coffee harvests, with prices going up in recent years.

A particularly harsh frost in the midst of the Brazilian winter in July 2021 caused a third of the crop in the arabica-producing region being destroyed.

Its price skyrocket. While frosts are factored in by Brazilian farmers, the severity of this one caught them off guard.

Warning that coffee could disappear from shelves by 2050 due to climate change