Most of the world’s 12.4 million coffee households are smallholder families with limited capacity to build resilience against climate change impacts. For most, coffee is their main or only source of income, and entire regions depend upon the viability of coffee as a cash crop. Changing weather patterns including prolonged dry spells, water shortage, hailstorms, erratic and extreme rainfall, have a strong impact on coffee production, especially as most of the smallholder families depend on rainfed agriculture.

Increasing soil degradation through water and wind erosion will further reduce the resilience to increasing temperature and extreme drought and/or flooding events. Deforestation of protected and unprotected areas and sensitive wildlife habitat remains a threat in coffee landscapes as, due to climate change, coffee production might shift to higher altitudes which in most coffee regions are under forest. The degradation of forests impairs important ecosystem functions, e.g. their significant carbon storage potential but also their critical importance for protecting water supplies.

Climate models project that important coffee growing regions around the world will most likely be lost if no climate adaptation measures are implemented immediately.

With coffee reaching the lowest prices in the last decade, climate change has further encouraged smallholders to give up on coffee and migrate away of coffee growing regions.

Without the adequate implementation of proven practices and effective climate approaches such as the coffee&climate methodology, the coffee industry might not only loose significant sourcing regions, but make the next generation of smallholders disappear over time. We must strengthen their livelihood situation instead and give them the proper tools to become resilient towards climate change.

 

Find out how coffee&climate is ensuring climate resilient livelihoods and landscapes in coffee growing regions: