Abstract
Coffee is highly sensitive to temperature and rainfall, making its cultivation vulnerable to geographic shifts in response to a changing climate. This could lead to the establishment of coffee plantations in new areas and potential conflicts with other land covers including natural forest, with consequent implications for biodiversity and ecosystem services. We project areas suitable for future coffee cultivation based on several climate scenarios and expected responses of the coffee berry borer, a principle pest of coffee crops. We show that the global climatically-suitable area will suffer marked shifts from some current major centres of cultivation. Most areas will be suited to Robusta coffee, demand for which could be met without incurring forest encroachment. The cultivation of Arabica, which represents 70% of consumed coffee, can also be accommodated in the future, but only by incurring some natural forest loss. This has corresponding implications for carbon storage, and is likely to affect areas currently designated as priority areas for biodiversity. Where Arabica coffee does encroach on natural forests, we project average local losses of 35% of threatened vertebrate species. The interaction of climate and coffee berry borer greatly influences projected outcomes.
Highlights
Climate change projections suggest that many currently cultivated areas will become less suitable for agriculture, at least for currently planted crops [1, 2]
At least 83% (±4%, mean ± SD for four concentration pathways considered) of the total future area suitable for coffee matches conditions required for Robusta cultivation, but only 17% (± 6%) of this area meets the requirements for Arabica (Table 1)
Our projections indicate that climate change will be detrimental for Arabica cultivation, though the area suitable for Robusta will increase greatly by 2050
Summary
Climate change projections suggest that many currently cultivated areas will become less suitable for agriculture, at least for currently planted crops [1, 2]. There is particular concern for coffee [3,4,5,6], the production of which is highly sensitive to local climate [7,8,9,10]. This has broad implications in that coffee is one of the world’s most important crop commodities, worth around $15 billion a year [11], and is grown by more than 25 million farmers in 60 countries [12]. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0133071 July 15, 2015
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