Roughly half the world’s arabica coffee-growing regions will become unsuitable for cultivation of the crop by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. The consequences of a shrinking coffee harvest extend far beyond a daily caffeine fix, but experts say solutions do exist. One promising approach is agroforestry. The nonprofit Coffee Watch has now created an e-library of all the research ever conducted on coffee agroforestry to help producers grow the finicky plant amid the changing climate.
Coffee is “a very sensitive little plant,” Etelle Higonnet, founder and director of Coffee Watch, told Mongabay in a video call. “It doesn’t like cold, but it doesn’t like hot. It doesn’t like dry, but it doesn’t like wet.” It only grows well in mountainous areas in the tropics.
Coffee agroforestry seeks to mimic natural ecosystems by growing coffee alongside other trees and bushes, creating a moderated microclimate that meets the “Goldilocks” balance of temperature and rainfall, mitigating the impacts of climate change. The approach can also support soil health and biodiversity, and produce better coffee. Companion plants grown with coffee can include fruit trees or other cash crops that provide additional income and food for coffee growers.
Coffee agroforestry is potentially a win-win, Higonnet said, but only if producers know how to do it. That’s where the Coffee Watch e-library comes in.
“Anything that’s ever been written about agroforestry coffee is in this library. That way, companies don’t have to do a million stupid pilot projects and reinvent the wheel for 20 years that we don’t have. They can just hoover up all this knowledge quickly, easily,” Higonnet said.
“Collecting this information in easily accessible electronic libraries in multiple languages is a crucial step in ensuring that coffee farmers can find valuable data for their daily production needs,” Guillermo Vargas Leitón, coordinator of education for agricultural sustainability with Café Monteverde in Costa Rica, told Mongabay.
Worldwide, roughly 25 million farmers and 100 million farmworkers depend on coffee for their livelihoods, Higonnet said. Many of them get by on just a few dollars a day. “If half of global coffee goes bust … and millions of people go broke, it could trigger humanitarian disasters and maybe even civil unrest.” Likewise, some countries also depend on coffee for their survival; in Burundi, coffee accounts for roughly 69% of total exports.
“So, if coffee goes bust, then governments will go bust too,” Higonnet said.
Brazil produces roughly a third of the world’s coffee, much of it in the Amazon. Vietnam is the second-largest producer, with roughly 18% of global production. Together, they supply nearly half the world’s coffee.
Higonnet said Brazil and Vietnam aren’t taking coffee agroforestry seriously right now, but when those “governments decide that they want to do agroforestry to climate-proof their coffee, save their economy and all those jobs … this [e-library] is there for them.”
Banner image: Coffee harvest inside Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. Image courtesy of Brett Kuxhausen.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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