CANBERRA: Increasing climate hazards could pose a major threat to global coffee production, scientists have warned.
In a study published on Friday, researchers from two Australian institutes, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ), found that all of the world’s top 12 coffee-producing regions faced a rise in climate hazards between 1980 and 2020.
Due to climate change effects such as extremes in temperature and rainfall were now occurring in multiple regions.
Doug Richardson, a CSIRO researcher who led the project, said coffee is a sensitive crop vulnerable to global warming impacts. “Coffee crops can fail if the annual average temperature and rainfall does not fall within an optimal range,” he said in a media release.
“Climate events have been becoming more frequent over the last 40 years and we see clear evidence of global warming playing a role in it, as the predominant climate hazards have shifted from cold and wet to warm and dry.”
Richardson noted that since 1980, the risk of synchronized crop failures global coffee production has significantly increased, which can be driven by climate hazards that impact multiple coffee-producing areas simultaneously.
‘Land suitable for coffee production to be halfed by 2050’
In a separate study published in 2014, researchers from the Humboldt University of Berlin found that land suitable for growing coffee could be reduced by 50 percent by 2050, posing a risk to the livelihoods of tens of millions of people.
The CSIRO and UniSQ study said that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a recurring climate pattern affecting the tropics and extratropics, is a strong indicator of climate hazards in tropical South America, Indonesia and Vietnam.
It said that farmers in southern Brazil, where conditions are unaffected by ENSO, could help offset production losses in those areas during significant ENSO events. — APP
