Connections / Coffee ↔ Climate change
How is coffee connected to climate change?
Why does coffee need a certain climate?
Coffee is a plant, and like every plant it only grows well in the right weather. The best coffee, Arabica, likes it mild — roughly 18 to 22 °C — with steady rain and no frost. That is why almost all coffee grows in a ring around the equator, often called the coffee belt: Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Vietnam and their neighbours.
This is the first link, and it is simple. Coffee is not separate from the climate. Coffee is a thing that lives inside a climate. The weather is not the background to the plant; it is part of what the plant is. The moment the climate changes, coffee changes with it.
How does a warmer world hurt coffee?
When the world gets warmer, the mild band coffee needs moves and shrinks. Land that was perfect becomes too hot or too dry. Studies suggest that by 2050 up to half of today's coffee land could become unsuitable. Farmers then have to climb higher up the cooler mountains — but there is only so much mountain.
Heat also brings pests and disease. A fungus called coffee leaf rust spreads faster in warmer, wetter air; a big outbreak hit Central America around 2012 and ruined many harvests. And single events matter: when Brazil was hit by drought and frost in 2021, harvests fell and coffee prices jumped around the world.
Does coffee also add to climate change?
Yes, and this is the part people forget. The link runs both ways. To plant more coffee, farmers sometimes clear forest, especially for sun-grown coffee with no shade trees. Cutting forest releases carbon and removes trees that would have soaked it up. On top of that, coffee is dried, roasted, packed and shipped across the world, and all of that burns energy.
So coffee is not only a victim of a warming world. It is also, in a small way, one of the causes. That makes it a loop: a warmer world hurts coffee, and growing coffee the wrong way helps warm the world. Loops like this are why a problem can quietly feed itself.
What does this mean for your cup?
For you, the change shows up as price and taste. Fewer good growing areas and more bad harvests mean higher prices and more ups and downs. Over time it may also mean different flavours, as farmers switch to tougher but plainer beans that handle heat better.
For the roughly 100 million people who depend on coffee for a living — most of them small farmers — it means much more. Their whole income sits on that narrow band of weather. When it moves, their lives move with it.
Possible solutions (assumptions)
Why does the demand grow at all? Behind it sits a wish: to be more efficient, to think more clearly, to perform more. Coffee is just one way to satisfy that wish — the more we want to perform, the more coffee we want. The solutions below are assumptions: paths that basically already exist and we simply have not looked at yet. In the model these are empty relations turning active.
More efficient coffee plants: because demand keeps growing, higher-yield varieties could give more coffee on the same land — so less forest has to go.
3D farming: growing plants in several stacked layers uses space better than spreading across the land. That saves land and spares forests.
Synthetic coffee: coffee made in the lab meets the demand without any plantation at all — it bypasses the most harmful step of the chain.
Through the model
In the model coffee is not a single thing but the starting node of a large network. And a network begins with one simple force: demand must be met. The demand for coffee pushes everything else into motion — farmers, farms and a whole supply chain exist because millions of people want a cup every morning.
Now ask, step by step: where does the coffee come from, how is it made, what hangs on it? Farmers run coffee farms. To make room they clear forests, they use fertiliser and they use water. In parallel the supply chain includes roasters and makers who run machines and computers, and ships and trucks that burn fuel. Each of these describing actions is a relation, each actor an entity — so from the single word coffee a whole network grows.
Almost every path ends in the same entity: greenhouse gases. Cleared forests release them, fertiliser emits them, fuel and power plants release them. The greenhouse gases drive global warming, and global warming means climate change. From the cup to the world's climate there is no jump, only one dense network — each edge a clear, grounded step.
Watch the words: clear, burn, release, drive — the describing verbs and adjectives ARE the relations in the graph. And the circle closes back: climate change harms the farms, dries up the water and fuels wildfires. These feedbacks turn empty or passive relations active again — the network keeps driving itself. It is only a lens, but one that shows why the link is not surprising but inevitable.
The building blocks behind this:
Frequently asked
Will coffee really run out by 2050?
It will not vanish, but it will get harder and costlier to grow. Research suggests up to half of today's growing land could become poorly suited by 2050 if warming continues, which means less supply and higher prices, not an empty shelf.
Why do coffee prices keep jumping?
Most coffee comes from a few regions, so one bad season hits the whole market. Drought, frost and disease — all made more likely by warming — cut harvests, and prices rise fast when supply drops.
Is drinking coffee bad for the planet?
Coffee has a footprint, mostly from clearing forests, plus drying, roasting and shipping. It is not the biggest driver of climate change, but shade-grown and locally roasted coffee, and simply wasting less, all lower the impact.
What is coffee leaf rust?
A fungus that attacks coffee plants and spreads more easily in warm, damp weather. Outbreaks, like the one across Central America around 2012, can destroy large parts of a harvest and push farmers off their land.