2024 Was a Warning

Over the course of two days in July 1975, unprecedented snowfall and freezing temperatures devastated coffee farms across the Brazilian states of Paraná and São Paulo. The Black Frost, as it became known, destroyed more than half of all Brazil’s coffee trees.

Following several years of low production worldwide, the crisis was enough to send global coffee prices skyrocketing. In 1977, the commodity price for arabica coffee—known as the C price—climbed to an all-time high of $3.39 per pound.

Now, once again, the C price is spiking, rising more than 80% over the course of the year and, as of December 10, eclipsing the previous record—assuming you don’t account for inflation. As then, this latest price surge has been influenced by a complex web of causes, from the economic to the political.

But overhanging everything is the climate crisis. This year, two of the world’s largest coffee-producing countries—Brazil and Vietnam—suffered some combination of drought, extreme heat, floods, or frost. These same issues are also impacting other coffee-producing countries across the world, and have been for some time.

The worst of climate change is always thought to be a future problem—2050 is the target for many corporate net-zero plans, and the year by which scientists predict a halving of suitable coffee-growing land. But, as 2024 has demonstrated, the crisis is already here. This year was the hottest on record worldwide, just eclipsing the previous record holder: 2023.

Researchers and farmers have been sounding the alarm for decades, and yet the coffee industry has mostly carried on as normal, aside from some sustainability projects and a more recent focus on buzzwords like “agroforestry” and “regenerative farming”. But all the corporate philanthropy means nothing if there’s no rain, if coffee farms burn or are flooded, or if there’s nobody left to harvest the cherries.

Coffee’s current record-high prices have benefited some farmers, while those who agreed contracts months ago will miss out. And the price will fall back again, because that’s what markets do. But this is a good time to reassess the assumption that coffee will always be cheap, because it is only going to get more expensive as the world heats and climate breakdown properly takes hold.

2024 is not an anomaly. It’s a climate warning for coffee—one that the industry cannot afford to ignore.

Bad Weather, Regularly

Coffee requires stable, predictable conditions in which to flourish, and is thus very susceptible to climate shocks. Most coffee production takes place in the Global South, in regions that are some of the most threatened by events like worsening drought, extreme heat, and flooding, as well as increased instances of pests and disease.

These threats have been known for decades. The fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released in 2014, stated that, “At a minimum climate change will cause considerable changes in the distribution of [coffee] crops disrupting the livelihoods of millions of small-holder producers”.

It hasn’t gotten any better in the years since: A 2019 report from Columbia University found that “by 2050, we project 75% of suitable land for Arabica coffee production and 63% of land for Robusta coffee production to be lost”.

In 2024 alone, Brazil suffered its worst drought in more than 70 years, causing wildfires which burned coffee farms; floods hit Costa Rica, Honduras, and Uganda; India was affected by heat, heavy rainfall, and landslides; and coffee farmers in Vietnam and Indonesia suffered as a historic heatwave brought soaring temperatures to Southeast Asia. Some of these incidents can be blamed on the cyclical weather phenomenon El Niño, but scientists consider that too to be influenced and enhanced by climate change.

Coffee has long faced unpredictable climate events, of course—part of the reason for the 1977 price spike was weather-related. But what happens when these events become regular occurrences rather than anomalies?

Consumption vs. Production

Much like the rest of the stock market, coffee’s commodity price responds to wider political and economic conditions, often rising and falling based on factors completely out of the industry’s control. Some of the biggest price swings unsurprisingly come from climate shocks. Bad weather in Brazil and Vietnam, the world’s two largest coffee producers, can send the C price shooting upwards; reports of opportune rains after long dry periods generally have the opposite effect.

The former is what contributed to this year’s record-high prices, combining with, among other factors, tariff threats from the incoming Trump administration and the European Union’s indecision over its deforestation legislation. 

At the same time, coffee consumption has increased dramatically—up nearly 15% in Asia since 2018, for example. Researchers expect demand to keep climbing, possibly even tripling by 2050. This will put more pressure on already-strained coffee farms to increase yield, and could drive more deforestation as farmers look to expand production.

Crucially, consumers don’t want to pay more for their coffee, as evidenced by the criticism of Starbucks’ expensive lattes and the growing popularity of pared-down, affordable brands like China’s Luckin Coffee. But this thirst for cheap coffee runs headlong into the accelerating climate crisis. How do you continue increasing yield and keeping prices low in a world of changing weather patterns, prolonged droughts, erratic rainfall, and supercharged hurricanes?

The coffee trader Volcafe predicts that globally, demand will outstrip supply for the fifth straight year in the 2025–2026 season. And demand is not going to slow down, which will continue to put upward pressure on coffee prices. Combined with worsening droughts and erratic rainfall patterns, it doesn’t bode well for coffee’s future.

On the Ground

I reached out to some contacts to gauge how those who produce and import coffee are feeling in this moment of spiking prices and growing climate instability. In Uganda, farmers Kenneth Barigye and Kabuuka Elimethidas both separately told me how beneficial the high C price has been for their farms this year, but noted that hotter dry seasons and delayed rains are leading to reduced yields as well as more instances of pests and disease.

Kenya and Ethiopia’s harvests are a full month ahead of schedule, which James Gibbs from Red Fox Coffee Merchants puts down to shifts in the countries’ climates. Agronomist Jonas Ferraresso told me that the farmers he works with in Brazil mostly contracted their coffee months ago and so haven’t benefited from the record prices, but also mentioned that they are becoming more interested in climate-mitigation techniques because of the increase in adverse weather events.

As well as hotter weather across the board, Brendan Adams of the importer Semilla described growing water scarcity in the regions of Central and South America that he works in. Lack of water is making it difficult, and expensive, for farmers to process coffee, Adams said, which is something that Ana Vizcaino of Finca Esperanza in Guatemala also mentioned.

These are just a few examples of the current climate problems facing coffee producers, and aren’t necessarily meant to be indicative. Some countries are currently doing better—Colombia, for example, is expected to see a 20% rise in production this year. Such increases are to be expected, and some countries, and even specific regions within those countries, will actively benefit from a warming climate.

But others will not, as Rebecca Speare-Cole reported in The Independent earlier this year. One growing region in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains has seen a production decline of 35% over the past five years. “We used to think it was something existential and far away, but now we see it is really here”, farmer Jaime Garcia Florez said.

Volatility is bad for everyone—except maybe market speculators—and creates a need for short-termism along the entire supply chain. Everyone I spoke to for this piece told me that what farmers really need are sustained and stable high prices that will let them invest in themselves and their farms over several years.

Business-As-Usual?

So what is the coffee industry doing about all this? Not enough. That 2019 Columbia University report was critical in its assessment of the industry’s response to the climate crisis: “Will the coffee sector continue following a business-as-usual trajectory of limited and piecemeal sustainability endeavors, which would ultimately result in further concentration of coffee producers and heightened supply risks? Or will the coffee sector undertake strong concerted efforts to support a more sustainable and resilient future for producers and the sector overall?”

Coffee companies love sustainability projects, love to fund research and talk about all the good they are doing. And many are doing good things. But zooming out, the business-as-usual trajectory described in that report continues five years later. In fact, companies are missing their own emissions-reduction targets and reneging on their sustainability commitments. A lot of effort and money is still going into carbon-neutral certification, which has been called “a smokescreen” and “greenwashing, pure and simple” by campaigners.

We can talk all we want about how coffee producers need to invest in agroforestry or regenerative agriculture, or set up legislation to try to stop people cutting down forests, but none of it really matters if corporations won’t rapidly decarbonise their operations. Coffee production generates carbon emissions, sure—but so does shipping green coffee halfway around the world, and so does expanding operations to a whole other continent or investing heavily in drive-thrus.

There are small signs that the industry is finally getting its shit together and taking the threat of climate change seriously, but the fragmented and inherently competitive nature of the sector makes progress difficult. Multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Global Coffee Platform or the Sustainable Coffee Challenge ostensibly bring companies, producer groups, NGOs, and others together to advance sustainability goals. A 2023 study looked at these initiatives and found that “firms’ participation led to lower levels of GHG emissions compared to similar non-participating counterparts, especially when they committed to the initiative with the intention to follow the proposed indications”.

More funding is also needed to help farmers with sustainability and climate mitigation—the authors of the 2019 Columbia University report put the number at $10 billion per year. This, they make clear, is not charity. “Rather, it is an avenue for downstream and midstream actors such as roasters, retailers, and traders to fulfill their co-responsibility for achieving a sustainable coffee sector and to shoulder more of the risks that currently fall too heavily on producers alone”.

A Harbinger

Climate change isn’t going anywhere; in fact, it’s accelerating. The commodity price, meanwhile, will probably fall again. As consultant Christopher Feran explained to me, this usually happens a few years after a surge, as a high C Market prompts farmers to expand and plant more trees, which results in an increase in production and a subsequent drop in prices. But the more climate change impacts coffee production, the more prices will seesaw, hurting producers and perpetuating volatility.

To me, this past year feels portentous. We have witnessed extreme weather events, coffee farms engulfed in wildfires, hurricane-caused flooding, and much more environmental disruption. Coffee prices have spiked as a result, leading to panicked news reports about the price of a latte.

This cycle will repeat again, and probably worse next time. Droughts and floods will continue to cause yields to fall, and coffee will get more expensive—as it should, as long as more of that money goes back to the producers. Researchers and farmers continue to sound the alarm about the impact that global heating is having on coffee farms. Meanwhile, Starbucks fired its CEO because its sales fell ever so slightly.

I don’t have any solutions to all this. Maybe hardier coffee species like canephora (more commonly known as robusta) will be the answer. Maybe it’s beanless coffee (please god no). Maybe the industry will hold a big town hall and disparate corporations and organisations will all agree to work together for the good of coffee and the planet.

For now, the future remains unclear. But here, at the tail end of 2024, what is clear is that climate change is a present-day crisis, not a future eventuality—and the coffee industry cannot afford to delay in confronting it.