The world could lose half of the best coffee growing land under a mild climate change scenario. Brazil, which is currently the largest coffee producer in the world, will see a decrease in the most suitable coffee growing land by 79%.
This is one of the main findings of a new study by scientists in Switzerland, which assessed the potential impacts of climate change on coffee, cashews and avocados. These three crops are considered among the important crops traded globally and produced mainly by small farmers in the tropics.
Coffee is by far the most important, with expected revenues of $460bn (£344bn) in 2022, while avocado and cashew figures are $13bn and $6bn respectively. While coffee acts primarily as a stimulating drink, avocados and cashews are widely consumed food crops that are rich in monounsaturated vegetable oils and other beneficial nutrients.
The main message of the new study says that projected climate changes are likely to lead to significant reductions in the area of land suitable for growing these crops in some of the major areas where they are currently grown. This, in turn, can affect both farmers and consumers around the world.
So far, most research on the future impacts of climate change on food has focused on staple crops such as wheat, maize, potatoes and oilseeds grown in temperate regions.
This reflected climate scientists’ tendency to focus on the potentially severe effects of climate change on temperate ecosystems, particularly due to changing temperatures and precipitation patterns.
In contrast, there has been little work on tropical ecosystems that make up about 40% of the global land area and where more than 3 billion people live, with up to 1 billion additional people expected to do so by the 1950s.
The tropics also maintain vast reservoirs of biodiversity, as well as areas for growing many important crops that provide income and food for their human population. The new research confirms and significantly expands findings from the relatively small number of existing studies on coffee, cashew and avocado crops.
An important innovation in the study is the examination of land and soil parameters as well as purely climatic factors such as temperature and precipitation patterns. This enables them to provide a more accurate view of future impacts that may dramatically alter the suitability of some tropical regions for growing certain crops due to changes in factors such as soil pH or texture.
The new study complements other recent research into palm oil. Although controversial and often associated with deforestation, palm oil remains one of the most important tropical crops in terms of human nutrition, helping to feed more than 3 billion people.
Dennis J. Murphy, Professor of Biotechnology and Head of Genomics and Computational Biology Research at the University of South Wales, and colleagues recently reviewed several modeling analyzes of how climate change affects overall disease incidence and death in oil palms. The stark conclusion was that tree mortality is likely to increase significantly after 2050, which could lead to the elimination of many crops in the Americas.
In addition, the incidence of major stem rot is expected to increase dramatically across Southeast Asia.
Collectively, these studies are beginning to reveal the astonishing extent and complexity of the effects of climate change and its associated factors on some of the more crops grown in the tropics. Importantly, the effects will not be distributed evenly and some regions may benefit from climate change according to rt.
For example, parts of China, Argentina, and the United States are likely to become more suitable for growing coffee, just as the likes of Brazil and Colombia see their lands less suitable. It is likely that many of these changes will now be “locked in” for at least the rest of this century, notwithstanding the disappointingly slow response of world leaders to curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore, it will be necessary for us to adapt to the changes taking place in the tropics, for example by shifting the cultivation of certain crops to different regions where the effects of the climate will be more moderate. However, it seems likely that whatever mitigation measures are adopted, many tropical crops will become scarcer and therefore more expensive in the future.
And when it comes to coffee, it may even go from a common everyday drink to a prized drink for the elite on special occasions.