Coffee: Endangered Species

Climate change is posing new challenges for coffee farmers

with the threat of extinction looming overhead

This website hopes to address how climate change is affecting the coffee industry. The rapid effects of climate change are stunting the overall growth of coffee plants in plantations all across South and Central America, central Africa, and the Asian Pacific, causing a struggle to meet demand, as well as a threat to the very livelihood and culture surrounding these coffee plantations. The climb in annual average temperatures and inconsistencies in annual rainfall patterns is causing a decline in the total area that the sensitive coffee beans like Arabica are able to grow naturally. These effects are reducing the available farm lands, and forcing many plantations to venture to higher altitudes. The increasingly unpredictable duration of wet and dry seasons spells doom for coffee plants, as they need very specific rainfall patterns to allow the plant to flower fully. Too long of a dry season, and the plants wither, too long a wet season, and the plants do not flower fully.