Coffee and climate change updates
It’s been about six months since I gathered together recent resources on coffee-growing and climate change (you can read past material in the new climate change category). Here are some new resources.
- James Hayes-Bohanan from Bridgewater State University explained how rising temperatures redefine altitudinal zones in coffee growing regions. Coffee farmers will have nowhere to go but up, and in many cases there is nowhere to go in “up.”
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The stunning Hartlaub’s Turaco (Tauraco hartlaubi) is a species threatened by African highland habitat reduction from climate change. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Likewise, this New York Times describes how many Kenyan bird species are also being squeezed upslope; they are threatened with extinction as deforestation from agriculture, in addition to simply running out of mountain. Agroforesty crops like shade coffee could provide refugia.
- And unpredictable rains and droughts have cut Kenya’s coffee output, creating problems with disease management, production, and harvest labor.
- The coffee growers of the Western Ghats of south India are also bracing for climate change problems.
- Anand and Geeta Pereira are both coffee farmers in India and active sustainable coffee researchers and activists. Read their Impact of Climate Change on Coffee (with great photos of local wildlife).
- Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center illustrates how much more carbon shade-grown coffee sequesters than sun coffee.
Peer-reviewed research related to coffee and/or agroforestry, and climate change:
What a great list of resources! A couple of these things are new to me and I’m interested in learning more, particularly about the workshop at Indiana University – I wish I had known about it! Did you go?
Kim
Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about this workshop until after the fact. I will keep a lookout for the publication of the papers mentioned that are being planned as an outcome, though.