Julián Ramírez

Predicted Impact of Climate Change on Coffee Supply Chains

Global circulation models all forecast that climate change will increase mean temperatures and change precipitation regimes. As a result, traditional coffee growing regions may disappear and new regions may appear. At the same time, demand for high quality, responsibly sourced coffee continues to grow globally. For sustainable sources of coffee, participants in the global coffee supply chain need to know where coffee will grow in the future and how the suitability of these areas will change over time. With this information, the supply chain then needs to develop appropriate site-specific mitigation and adaptation strategies for both the short and the long term, to guarantee coffee supply as well as to support improved livelihoods for rural communities. In this paper, we firstly quantify the impact of climate change on the suitability of land to grow coffee in a case study in Nicaragua and on acidity content of beverage coffee in a case study in the Veracruz Department of Mexico. Secondly, we propose site-specific adaptation strategies and finally identify critical potential impacts of climate change on the overall supply chain and the implications for all actors in the system. We conclude the paper by identifying key directions for future research to seek mitigation and adaptation strategies at both the community and the supply-chain level.

The nature and impact of climate change in the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) basins

In this article the authors assess the potential impacts of projected climate change on water, livelihoods and food security in the Basin Focal Projet basins. The authors consider expected change within the context of recently observed climate variability in the basins to better understand the potential impact of expected change and the options available for adaptation. They use multi-global circulation model climate projections for the AR4 SRES A2a scenario, downscaled and extracted for each basin. They find significant differences in the impacts (both positive and negative impacts) of climate change, between and within basins, but also find large-scale uncertainty between climate models in the impact that is projected.