By Anne Connor for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

There's not enough coffee in the world. In 2023, the world produced 3 percent less than it consumed. Growing consumer demand in Asia exacerbates the deficit, while climate change affects supply. Coffee is susceptible to heat and drought. It needs predictable conditions to thrive, and conditions now are anything but predictable.

Heat and novel rain patterns harm plants and encourage coffee rust, a devastating fungal disease. Rains may come too early or too late. There may be too much rain or too little. Or all of the above.

Climate change causes labor problems and hurts farm owners, too. Lower yields mean less cash flow, contributing to wage stagnation. Underpaid pickers don’t show up, and coffee cherries rot on the ground, wasting the harvest. Heat can also cause coffee to ripen before pickers are available; again, the cherries fall and are wasted. Some harvests last for six months instead of the standard two, and some are shockingly short.

Climate also intersects with infrastructure. Sometimes, the coffee is picked, but heavy rains wash out the roads, and farmers can’t get their product to market. Or harvests are compressed into a two-week period, and the coffee mills can’t handle the tsunami of cherries waiting to be processed.

With increasingly tight margins, farm owners can’t afford the upgrades needed to make their coffee production more water-efficient, and they can’t buy new cultivars that resist coffee rust and heat.

If smallholder farmers are “deciding between ‘feed my family,’ or ‘renovate the farm,’ they’re going to feed their family,” says Maria Cleaveland, a coffee industry expert and board member of the U.S. chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA). Without hope, people leave—and many of them head for the U.S.

A Shift in Coffee Growing Regions

About 70 percent of global coffee is arabica, favored in the U.S. But climate models show what farmers are already experiencing on the ground: Climate change and arabica are incompatible, at least where coffee is currently grown.

Some 50 percent of current coffee-growing land will likely be unsuitable for arabica by 2050. Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, and Indonesia, four of the biggest coffee nations, are on that list. Growers there are looking for ways to delay the tipping point.

On the plus side, locations further from the equator—the U.S. Gulf Coast, China’s Yunnan province, and parts of Uruguay and Argentina—will likely be coffee-friendly by 2050. Enabled by increasingly favorable weather in Yunnan, coffee production there has soared by nearly 500 percent since 2006.

Coffee plants usually take three to four years to produce their first yield, making the crop a gamble at startup, but rising global demand may provide the incentive. In fact, coffee is increasingly grown in California, says Cleaveland.

Coffee roasters and retailers strategically adjust their sourcing to regional conditions. “We definitely think a lot about that,” says Andi Trindle Mersch, vice president of coffee operations and sustainability at Philz Coffee. “I consider this to be our job as coffee buyers now.” Trindle Mersch says that Philz plans 10 to 15 years ahead in sourcing and is strongly invested in Brazil. Beyond 15 years? “We’re going to keep tasting and trying.”

Could the Answer Come From Trees?

Working in the field at very high temperatures has been exhausting,” says Miriam Monteiro de Aguiar of Brazil’s Cachoeira Farm, which has produced certified organic coffee since 1994. The blazing heat also harms the fragile coffee plants, driving Monteiro de Aguiar back to coffee’s agroforestry roots.

Even considering agroforestry, growing coffee in the shade, is unusual in Brazil. Most farms there still use open-field agriculture—but this approach may not work for much longer in the new climate reality.

“We have been experimenting with shade-grown coffees,” Monteiro de Aguiar says. “More recently, we’ve been fascinated by and experimenting with syntropic agriculture.”

Syntropic agroforestry involves carefully trimming the tree canopy, balancing sun and shade to prevent fungal diseases. As they prune, workers pile leaves and branches on the ground. The biomass retains water and decomposes, enriching the soil. Using fruit trees for shade improves food security for the producers, too.

Although these regenerative models are “vigorous,” as Monteiro de Aguiar says, they are still rare. “Many producers, scientists, and researchers believe and invest more in the scientific development of drought-resistant varieties,” she notes.

Globally, many coffee farmers are moving uphill into forested areas to escape the heat. Coffee was once grown exclusively in the forest, shaded by native trees. Agroforestry reduces the ambient temperature, enriches the soil, and controls evaporation so the plants don’t dry out. It also protects coffee blossoms against frost.

But shade-grown coffee has its own problems. Perhaps most damningly, it increases the incidence and severity of coffee rust by 22 percent, although new techniques like syntropic agroforestry could help. Harvesting shade-grown coffee can be costly and difficult, as workers must contend with roots, branches, machetes, ants, and snakes while reaching for coffee cherries.

Attracted by the higher yields of sun-grown coffee, some conventional farmers clear-cut the hills, a practice that robs the coffee of shade and the land of biodiversity. One study found that arabica’s move into forested areas could result in the loss of 35 percent of threatened vertebrate species, including mammals, birds, and amphibians, due to clear-cutting.

Policy changes could offer new hope for agroforestry. Starting in late 2024, the E.U. will prohibit coffee imports from countries with new deforestation. “It’s in the air; everybody wants to know how this will affect their relationship with their buyers,” says Blanca Castro of Guatemala, executive director of the IWCA.

Some national governments have set policies to encourage shade-grown coffee. This includes Mexico, says Santiago José Arguello Campos, Coordinador General de Agricultura of Mexico. Agroforestry is “very important to preserve biodiversity,” he says. The agriculture department backs up this recommendation with technical assistance. That help is working: 96 percent of the coffee grown in Mexico is now shade-grown. Mexico has nearly 1.5 million acres of shade-grown coffee, much of it bordering protected natural areas.

Coffee worldwide is increasingly grown alongside other crops, such as avocados, plantains, cacao, sugarcane, nuts, citrus, and spices. Castro says this intercropping offers shade for coffee plants and financial stability for farmers.

Some Mexican producers grow coffee under banana trees, for example. The fruit is for farmers to consume themselves, says Arguello Campos, and farmers sell the large banana leaves to the U.S. food market for tamale wraps. This practice can generate up to 30 percent of their total income.

In places that are increasingly too hot or dry to grow coffee, such crops may someday support former coffee producers, but for now, they supplement coffee revenues.

Buying Time

Daniele Giovannucci, a former coffee consultant for the World Bank and founder of the Committee on Sustainability Assessment, sees coffee’s climate adaptation as splitting into two paths. One is specialty coffees, such as shade-grown gourmet varieties. The other, which is easier to scale, is varietals suited to new climate conditions.

Hardier coffee plants could buy time in the coming decades. One possibility is robusta, popular in Europe for espresso and more heat-resistant than arabica. A 2022 study predicted that about 83 percent of the world’s future coffee-growing areas would support robusta, but only 17 percent would support arabica.

Arabica’s ideal temperature range is 64-73 degrees Fahrenheit, with 47 inches of rainfall annually. By contrast, robusta thrives (in some places) at 72-86 degrees Fahrenheit. Notably, a study of robusta’s ideal temperature in Southeast Asia found it to be less heat-tolerant there. Robusta also requires more rainfall, at least 69 inches annually.

David Pohl, founder of Pohl Coffee Consulting and a certified coffee quality rater, says robusta is starting to be recognized as a specialty coffee. To bring out its best flavors, robusta must be processed, roasted, and brewed differently from arabica. Robusta prepared like arabica would not be considered a fine coffee.

Despite robusta’s potential climate advantages, Big Coffee has yet to embrace it fully. Robusta didn’t get its own quality standards until 2010. Pohl was one of the first “R-raters,” experts trained by the Coffee Quality Institute in robusta standards. Before 2010, robusta was judged by the same standards as arabica, which is rated on its “bright notes” and is rewarded for acidity. Robusta is less acidic; a fine robusta is balanced between sweet and salty, for example.

Robusta has vastly greater genetic diversity than arabica; most of its thousands of varieties have yet to be explored. The best robustas Pohl has tasted are from Africa. “They just have more to work with. And so, their coffees tend to be really, really good, whether or not they’re known to the world,” says Pohl.

Hybrid coffee plants are another possible climate solution—for farms that can get them. One hybrid, Centroamericano, introduced in 2010, scores well in “cupping” or taste ratings. It is high-yielding and rust-resistant and thrives in the shade at high altitudes. However, “only a handful” of hybrids “have become commercially available to farmers in the last 15 years, and only in select countries,” according to the nonprofit World Coffee Research.

World Coffee Research has operated a non-GMO breeding program to develop more climate-resistant coffee varieties for the past two years. They use a vast dataset to determine future conditions by country and aim for plants that will thrive in specific regions.

Trindle Mersch says Philz Coffee would be open to robustas or hybrids if the right flavor profiles came along. So far, however, they haven’t tasted one that works for their blends. She notes that Philz supports World Coffee Research. “We’re definitely believers in using science to create quality hybrids and breeds we can work with,” she says.

In 2012, coffee rust hit Mexico and Central America hard, depressing yields through 2015. Mexico’s agriculture department distributed rust-resistant cultivars such as Oro Azteca, Marsellesa, and Costa Rica 95, along with technical assistance on Fair Trade and organic certification. The project also encouraged shade-planting.

Arguello Campos says the three-year project put 200 million plants a year directly into the hands of farmers. The organizers released them in waves, allowing the original plants to yield what they could while the new ones matured.

“The goal was to increase density and resilience,” says Arguello Campos. The Mexican government invested the equivalent of $70 million per year in the project, supplemented by corporate investments and farm labor, in what Arguello Campos describes as a public-private-social venture.

Beanless Coffee

What if these options can’t hold back the impact of climate change? Scientists are exploring sustainable coffee alternatives in laboratories around the world.

A Seattle startup, Atomo Coffee, says it has cracked coffee’s flavor code—without coffee beans. Atomo extracts compounds from ingredients such as ramón seeds, which the ancient Mayans used to make a hot beverage with notes of chocolate and dark-roasted coffee. Atomo also uses date pits that might otherwise end up in landfills; for millennia, date pits have been used to make a coffee-like beverage in the Middle East. The company uses a mass spectrometer to compare its product to coffee at the molecular level.

Atomo founder Andy Kleitsch says the company started its global hunt by analyzing these traditional ingredients and wartime substitutes like chicory and acorns.

“What we found is that these substitutes don’t taste like coffee. And we don’t think consumers are ready to give up conventional coffee to drink a substitute. For us to be successful, we had to create a product that is an exact replica of coffee,” says Kleitsch.

Large coffee companies are concerned about the looming crisis, he says. “They’re all looking to address supply chain problems and quality issues.” Atomo, whose factory starts production in spring 2024, plans to introduce its product as a sideline in existing coffee shops.

In San Francisco, Minus Coffee uses an upcycled approach similar to Atomo’s but with different ingredients, like chicory, millet, and carob. Founder Maricel Saenz, who grew up in Costa Rica, says Minus distributes canned cold brews to large food-service companies. The company donates 1 percent of its profits to a group called Doselva, which equips coffee farmers for intercropping.

And yes, both companies add caffeine—it’s extracted from tea.

Will consumers accept beanless coffee? Kleitsch and Saenz say their products fare well in blind taste tests. Atomo’s backers think there’s a market; they include Horizons Ventures, an early funder of Impossible Foods, and S2G Ventures, an early funder of Beyond Meat.

Trindle Mersch says these alternatives are “just a different product,” like carob versus chocolate. And, she says, “I never moved away from chocolate.”

Beanless coffee can also come from coffee plants.

A research team in Finland released a proof-of-concept study on lab-cultured coffee in late 2023 in hopes that food scientists would find it useful. They used a bioreactor—a container of liquid growth medium—to grow coffee from plant cells, like brewing beer, but without the fermentation.

“The benefit of this technology is that it’s not location-specific; you can run it wherever you want,” says Heiko Rischer, principal scientist and head of plant biotechnology at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He notes that the closed system gives growers control over water purity and nutrients.

Cultured coffee grows fast, in about 10 days, and inexpensively in the lab, and it’s real coffee. It doesn’t look like a coffee bean but is easy to harvest because it’s essentially pre-ground. When the floating mat of coffee cells is drained and dried, it yields a fine powder, ready to roast. Of course, roasting powdered coffee requires a different approach than roasting whole beans, a challenge for this emerging product.

But is lab-cultured coffee good coffee? The research group readily admits that the flavor profile needs some tweaking. Its primary flavor is a smoky burned-sugar aroma with “appropriate bitterness.” Cultured coffee’s flavor can be refined with experimentation, says Sarah O’Connor, a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For example, changing the media in which cells are grown can have a dramatic effect.

David Pohl thinks it’s too soon to take coffee production into the lab. In a doomsday scenario, with farmed coffee no longer viable, he’d be happy to have alternatives. But for right now, “it’s not necessary,” he says. “You have millions of coffee farmers around the world looking for viable ways to produce coffee, and you’ve got a lot of scientists trying to do the right thing.” He adds, “We do have hope for the future.”


Anne Connor wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

This week, world leaders gather in Baku, Azerbaijan for the 29th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP29. Last year’s global climate conference broke new ground as the first to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from food, with over 100 countries signing a key declaration to deliver change in their food sectors by 2025. Food systems are responsible for a third of global emissions, mostly driven by meat, especially beef. Yet even as a chorus of researchers repeatedly stress the urgency of fixing our broken food systems, only a fraction of the countries who pledged support have made any progress.

Many Countries Still Need to Update Climate Plans, Despite Pledges

At COP28, 160 countries signed on to the UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. These countries play a significant role — the 160 make up 70 percent of farmers and 80 percent of emissions from agriculture. A key point of the declaration: the countries committed to adding agriculture and food systems into their national climate plans — also known as “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs). In other words, the agreement promised a concrete commitment to reduce food-related emissions.

Yet progress has been slow. Based on estimates, there are roughly just 40 countries on track to have a revised NDC in time for COP30 in Belém, Brazil next year, Edward Davey, a senior advisor for The Food and Land Use Coalition at the World Resources Institute (WRI), tells Sentient. That means 120 countries haven’t done any work to incorporate food into national climate plans so far.

While Davey says he is “very proud” of what was achieved at COP28 — calling it “a privilege to be involved in a supporting role to the UAE government as it brokered the food declaration” — he also expressed concern: “we do very much need to deliver on that declaration,” he wrote to Sentient in a subsequent email, stressing the critical importance of all 160 countries bringing revised NDCs to Brazil.

One country that has signaled they will bring a revised NDC to this year’s COP is the United Kingdom. The UK cannot possibly meet its net zero goals by 2035 and beyond if it doesn’t address diet shifts, Davey says.

And this isn’t just the case for the UK. Researchers at the World Resources Institute have warned that Global North countries cannot meet their international climate commitments without making dietary change — that is, shifting to more plant-forward diets — part of the solution.

For his part, Davey has recommended “forcefully” to the UK Government that its revised national climate plan should include solutions that address the way we farm and the way we eat. Davey cites strategies like better land management, changes to feed, reducing herd sizes, reducing food loss and waste precision breeding, among others. But dietary change — “people of the UK eating less meat per capita” — has to be in the mix too, he says.

There are obvious challenges. Shifting diets and the politics of meat consumption is a contentious subject in the UK, just as it is in the United States. And yet, meat consumption in the Global North plays a massive role in driving global emissions.

There are roughly 20 Global North countries –– including the UK and United States –– that contribute the majority of global agricultural and land use emissions, Davey says. “I think the UAE Declaration will succeed or fail [depending on] whether those 20 or so countries come back to Belém next year with a serious, quantifiable goal of food [and land use] management.”

At COP28, food system pledges also came from businesses and foundations. More than $7 billion was allocated last year from the UAE, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund among others. Jeff Bezos’ foundation committed $57 million into climate food solutions such as reducing methane emissions from livestock. Further, more than 200 non-state actors, including businesses, financial institutions and farmers, signed up to the a UN Call to Action to transform food systems. Large food companies like Nestle and Danone were also signatories.

The United Nations Roadmap Faces Delays and Scrutiny

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced a three-part roadmap for food systems at last year’s conference — aimed at curbing food-related emissions while also addressing global food security concerns. The UN has predicted the world’s population will hit 9.7 billion by the year 2050, so an ongoing global food system challenge is figuring out how to feed nearly 10 billion people without making climate pollution even worse.

The roadmap is supposed to illuminate a path forward — a way for countries to mesh food system change with climate and health goals.

Here too, however, progress has stalled. The full version of the first part of the roadmap has been very delayed and the current “brief” version has also drawn criticism. Experts from the U.S., Brazil and Norway published a comment in Nature earlier this year critiquing the roadmaps various “missed opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” among other issues. The guidelines on how to sustainably increase productivity in the Global South, while still protecting the environment, has also been left ambiguous, notes Beatriz Luraschi, a policy analyst at the European Climate Foundation.

Another setback to the roadmap was a letter to the FAO signed by more than 100 academics, calling for a controversial livestock “Pathways” report published at COP28 to be retracted over unclear and inaccurate methods. They called for the release of the roadmap to be “delayed until the FAO has engaged in serious dialogue with experts and civil society in a reflective process to assess what went wrong in the Pathways report,” as well as an overhaul of the FAO’s internal review processes.

That Pathways report seemingly promoted growing the livestock industry while ignoring emissions. The authors of a study mentioned in the report also spoke out separately, saying the FAO report “distorted” their research and underestimated the climate impact of reducing meat consumption.

These criticisms “cast a shadow over the roadmap,” says Davey, who is hopeful for the roadmap’s next installment.

The first two parts of the roadmap — both global and regional “pathways” — are due to be published at COP29. However, so far there has been no formal review or consultations with stakeholders, Luraschi says, so it’s still unclear whether the FAO will address the raised concerns in the new reports.

The Launch of a Dedicated Food Transformation Coalition

Despite the slow movement elsewhere, one coalition has made progress. The Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF) comprising Norway, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Cambodia, was born at last year’s COP to drive change in their country’s prospective food systems. The Alliance is “incredibly powerful [and] one of the best things that happened at COP28,” Davey says.

Supported in part by the Bezos Earth Fund, The Alliance acts across ten key priority areas to transform food systems, including food waste reduction and gender parity advancement. These sweeping focus areas are significant, says Clem Perry, director of partnerships for the Food and Land Use Coalition which acts as part of the ACF’s Secretariat, as each of these individual countries face their own unique challenges. “The production, the consumption, the trade flows, the land use challenges, the nutrition [and] health levels and challenges are very, very different in each [Alliance] country,” Perry tells Sentient.

Members of the Alliance spent this year in regular talks, both by phone and in person every three months, hashing out their biggest challenges and goals. “One of the most difficult trade-offs that we’ve been grappling with are those between improving or enhancing national feed production whilst not negatively impacting nature,” Perry says.

Sierra Leone has set an example of how to do this effectively by cracking down on their excessive rice imports and reforming their own national food system without encroaching on virgin rainforest. With a $100 million investment from the African Development Bank, Sierra Leone has put the infrastructure in place to increase rice production without deforesting. “In less than a year, that felt like a really significant and massive win and is exactly the kind of thing that we’re looking to replicate with other countries,” Perry says.

The hope is that countries can rally together to act as a collective to tackle food systems, Davey says, as we don’t want developed countries to simply offshore the environmental impact of farming to others. “We live in an integrated world. The decisions that one country takes [has] a bearing on another,” he says. It remains to be seen whether this week’s conference in Azerbaijan can correct the course.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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A small rural town in northwest Pennsylvania is using a combination of state and federal funds to implement "green" projects as part of its Climate Action Plan.

Meadville's plan started in 2018 by measuring its greenhouse gas emissions and setting local goals to reduce them, and to make the community more resilient.

Autumn Vogel, a member of the Meadville City Council, said an Environmental Advisory Council was created, and government funding has allowed them to open the bidding on a rooftop solar array on the Victor C. Leap Building, located downtown.

"That building just got a new roof and new utilities," Vogel explained. "It's already pretty efficient and so we will be able to do this rooftop solar installation thanks to some of the added capacity of our Shared Energy Manager; also some support we've gotten from PA Solar Center."

Vogel pointed out it has been financially feasible due to the Treasury's "direct pay" program, which will decrease the cost of the solar installation. Meadville is also one of two Pennsylvania communities, along with Reading, to receive support from the nonprofit Green Building Alliance Resilient Communities program.

Jaime Kinder, mayor of Meadville, said green projects require significant creativity and effort to secure federal and state funding, and said they've skillfully navigated the application process to get these funds. Kinder emphasized new projects now on the agenda include transportation upgrades.

"As far as something new, it would be to put solar on the fire department," Kinder noted. "We've already tried that, and we're going to keep pushing for that. And then some EVs, some charging stations. We have no public charging stations in our town. We're looking hopefully, to put some EV charging stations around 'the diamond.'"

Kinder added the Climate Action Plan also includes making Meadville more walkable, to improve accessibility and reduce car dependence. With a "Walk Works" grant, they are making plans for better crosswalks, sidewalks and bike paths.


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On Election Day, a broad coalition of conservationists, labor, and others helped defeat a ballot initiative to repeal Washington State's Climate Commitment Act. The act, passed in 2021, is the state's state's primary vehicle for reducing emissions and pollution and a major source of funding for clean energy infrastructure and climate initiatives.

Billy Wallace, political and legislative director with the Washington and Northern Idaho District Council of Laborers, said passage would have meant the loss of as many as 45,000 clean-energy jobs.

"We started building a coalition, and it ended up being a little over 600 groups, from labor, from environmental. The Catholic Church was on it, We had 21 of the 29 tribes sign on. So it was a very diversified coalition that came together to save this funding." he said.

Initiative 2117 was one of four ballot measures backed by the Let's Go Washington PAC funded primarily by conservative hedge-fund manager Bryan Heywood. Wallace said that over the next 8 years, Climate Commitment Act investments would create 45,000 jobs in Washington State.

Wallace added the coalition faced an uphill battle to help the public understand that jobs and the environment were both on the line.

"These are the investments, even in schools, clean air, clean water. And once we figured out we got to educate the people on what's going on, it was complicated. It was confusing for the general public. So we raised $18.4 million for this campaign from that big coalition," he continued.

Climate Jobs Washington and its member unions formed a coalition to protect the act. Wallace said labor organizations were instrumental in passing the original measure three years ago.

"It was crucial for our members. Our members work in the building trades. About 75%, 80% of the work we do is on prevailing wage work in transpo[rt]. So it was a no-brainer for us to jump in," he added.