Wake up and smell the global warming
Your double-double may be in trouble.
British and Ethiopian researchers warn the wild versions of the Arabica bean may be burning towards extinction by 2080, making the last drop sooner than you may have thought.
And for the backbone bean of the world’s coffee industry, it would be a caffeine catastrophe at the hands of climate change.
Wild species could disappear as soon as 2020, according to researchers.
Researchers at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew expect some Arabica plants in parts of Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya would be left outside of their bioclimatic range — too hot and too stressed to survive. But before a bean brouhaha erupts at the supermarket, the study makes clear that the concern is limited to wild plants only, not the cultivated crop that forms 70 per cent of the world’s coffee supply.
In a cruel twist for coffee lovers, the study said those wild plants may hold the genes the Arabica bean needs to survive in our warming world. The current cultivated crop operates in a slim temperature range, ideally between 18 and 21C. Above 23C, the bean ripens too fast, making for a bad brew.
“As the climate changes, the narrow genetic base of the cultivated will make it very difficult for them to adapt,” Peter Raven, a botanist and president emeritus of Missouri Botanical Garden, told the Star by telephone.
“That’s 70 per cent of the world coffee crop. They’re in trouble even though this study didn’t address that so directly,” added Raven, who was not part of the British-led study.
Suitable land for wild Arabica beans is also a risk. Low estimates by the study suggest 65 per cent of the current suitable land to grow the plant would be lost by 2080.
In the worst-case scenario there would be an “almost 100 per cent reduction, by the year 2080,” the researchers wrote. Raven added that at high temperatures, when the coffee plant is stressed and out of balance, pests and disease become increasing concerns.
“We need the widest possible range of genetic diversity, and that is for sure what’s being lost in those populations that they did study,” Raven said.
“A lot of the genetic diversity will go. The question is whether it will all go,” Raven said.
“It’s bad. Definitely bad.”