How Climate Change Is Threatening Your Daily Cup of Coffee

Per­haps this will final­ly get your atten­tion. In Ethiopia, glob­al warm­ing is putting the cul­ti­va­tion of cof­fee at risk, to the point where the indige­nous Ethiopi­an cof­fee plant, Cof­fea ara­bi­ca, could go extinct with­in 70 years. That’s no laugh­ing mat­ter, espe­cial­ly if you con­sid­er that cof­fee orig­i­nat­ed in Ethiopia, and the coun­try remains an epi­cen­ter of cof­fee pro­duc­tion today. That’s the depress­ing … and per­haps moti­vat­ing … upshot of an oth­er­wise art­ful­ly-pro­duced film by The Roy­al Botan­ic Gar­dens (aka Kew Gar­dens) in Eng­land.  If you want to dig into the research show­ing the impact of cli­mate change on cof­fee, see the report pub­lished in Novem­ber, 2012 called: The Impact of Cli­mate Change on Indige­nous Ara­bi­ca Cof­fee (Cof­fea ara­bi­ca): Pre­dict­ing Future Trends and Iden­ti­fy­ing Pri­or­i­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

This is Cof­fee!: A 1961 Trib­ute to Our Favorite Stim­u­lant

New­ly added to our list of 750 Free Online Cours­es:

Intro­duc­tion to Lit­er­a­ture and the Envi­ron­ment — YouTube — iTunes Video — Ken Hilt­ner, Prince­ton

How Cli­mate Works — YouTube — iTunes Video — Mul­ti­ple Profs, Prince­ton