Ethiopia’s Coffee-Growing Areas May Be Headed for the Hills

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https://eos.org/articles/ethiopias-coffee-growing-areas-may-be-headed-for-the-hills

Source:  By Mekonnen Teshome Tollera, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Relocating Ethiopia’s coffee-growing areas to higher-altitude regions will be a key measure for climate change resilience in the country, a team of researchers suggests. ...a temperature increase of more than 2°C could occur by midcentury across much of Africa and exceed 4°C by the end of the century. This change could render up to 59% of Ethiopia’s current coffee-growing landscape unsuitable for growing coffee, said study coauthor Sebsebe Demissew, a natural science professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the home of Coffea arabica, originally a forest plant restricted to the highlands and today the most prominent cultivar in the world. Arabica and other coffee varieties account for more than 30% of Ethiopia’s exports, amounting to almost 240 metric tons in 2019. About 15 million people in Ethiopia are involved in some aspect of the coffee economy through farming, distribution, or sales. Study coauthor Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom, said that climate change will negatively impact much of the current coffee-farming landscape of Ethiopia. ...according to another study by Davis, 60% of coffee species in the world are threatened with extinction. ...Davis’s article was published in 2017 in Nature Plants and was the result of a collaboration with in-country partners for the project Building a Climate Resilient Coffee Economy for Ethiopia.... [  

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