THE PROCESS IN MOTION

Where will coffee be able to grow in 2050?

Start the scene or choose a stage. The animation simplifies the mechanism; what follows gives the details and the available references.

▶ Play the process01An altitude band02The band moves up03Half the area04Canephora pays in yield

An altitude band

In Mesoamerica, the climate favorable to arabica today lies between 400 and 2,000 m. Ovalle-Rivera and his coauthors established it by cross-referencing 21 circulation models, keeping only what they agree on.

Read the stages without animation

1. An altitude bandIn Mesoamerica, the climate favorable to arabica today lies between 400 and 2,000 m. Ovalle-Rivera and his coauthors established it by cross-referencing 21 circulation models, keeping only what they agree on.
2. The band moves upBy 2050, these climates would move up to 800 to 2,500 m. The map is redrawn from the top: low altitudes and high latitudes lose, the highlands near the equator may gain. Rabobank already counts 8% of arabica areas as outside their climate, and about 20% in 2050.
3. Half the areaThe first peer-reviewed global projection, that of Bunn and coauthors in 2015, concludes that the climatically suitable area will shrink by about 50% by 2050, whatever the emissions scenario. Brazil would lose nearly 80% of its most suitable land; Honduras would go from 53 to 12% of suitable territory, Ethiopia from 39 to 50%.
4. Canephora pays in yieldAcross 798 farms followed for ten years, the yield optimum of canephora lies below a mean of 20.5 °C, well under the 22 to 30 °C quoted everywhere. Each degree above a minimum of 16.2 °C and a maximum of 24.1 °C costs about 14% of yield; beyond 25.1 °C, it is halved.

To remember: The band where arabica grows moves up and narrows, and canephora is not a cost-free switch.

In history: Rabobank's March 2026 report takes up the method of the 2022 Zurich study; it is a serious projection, not a peer-reviewed result.

Read the full article and its sources ↓

Climate projections compared; full references in the text. Only the Rabobank line is not peer reviewed.

The first peer-reviewed global projection is that of Bunn, Läderach, Ovalle-Rivera and Kirschke, published in Climatic Change in 2015.

It starts from a database of georeferenced production sites, that is, plots whose exact coordinates are known. Machine-learning algorithms draw from it the climate that coffee actually accepts.

Its conclusion: by 2050, the global area climatically suitable for coffee would shrink by about 50%, whatever the emissions scenario. The result therefore does not depend on the assumption one adopts about future emissions.

The detail by species matters as much as the total. Arabica suffers from temperatures. Canephora suffers from intra-seasonal variability, that is, from swings of heat and rain within a single season. Both lose, for two different reasons.

The same year, Ovalle-Rivera and coauthors cross 21 general circulation models in PLOS One on the A2a scenario. Crossing models serves to isolate what they agree on, which a single model cannot say.

In the median scenario, 37% of the current area would lose 20 to 40% of suitability. In Mesoamerica, the climates favorable to arabica would move up from the 400-2,000 m band to 800-2,500 m.

The map is therefore redrawn from the top. Low altitudes and high latitudes lose. The highlands near the equator, Ethiopia, Kenya, high-altitude Colombia, may gain.

Bunn et al. 2015, Climatic Change 129, pp. 89-101, doi 10.1007/s10584-014-1306-x; Ovalle-Rivera et al. 2015, PLOS One 10(4) e0124155

Grüter and his coauthors, from ZHAW, add in January 2022 in PLOS One a variable the others had left aside: soils. And they compare three crops, coffee, cashew and avocado.

Coffee comes out as the most vulnerable of the three, with negative impacts in all the major producing regions. Under a scenario that is nonetheless moderate, the global area of the best suitability class decreases by more than half compared with 2000, and Brazil loses nearly 80% of its most suitable land.

For Ethiopia, Moat, Davis and their coauthors had published in 2017 in Nature Plants a two-part result that must be read in full, because usually only half of it is quoted.

First part: 39 to 59% of the current cultivated area would become unsuitable by 2070-2099. Second part, and it is the one that gets forgotten: relocation to higher altitude, combined with the conservation or restoration of forests, could on the contrary quadruple the suitable area.

The difference between these two futures is not climatic, it is political. The country warmed by 1.3 °C between 1960 and 2006, and coffee supports 15 million people there across four million small farms.

The sixth IPCC report, in 2022, holds in its Working Group II, chapter 5, that warming and drying trends have already reduced the areas suitable for coffee in the tropics. It even devotes a box to adaptation and maladaptation in cocoa and coffee, that is, to responses that aggravate the problem they claim to solve.

Grüter et al. 2022, PLOS One 17(1) e0261976; Moat et al. 2017, Nature Plants 3, 17081, abstract and p. 1; IPCC AR6 WGII 2022, ch. 5, ipcc.ch

The most recent work is not academic: it is a Rabobank report published on March 30, 2026. It takes up the method of the 2022 Zurich study, which allows the two to be compared.

Its overall conclusion comes down to two figures. Today, 8% of the areas currently planted with arabica are already outside the climatic conditions of the species. By 2050, this share would reach about 20%.

The first of the two is not a projection but a finding: on these plots, the climate has already moved out of the range that arabica accepts.

The detail by country is more telling than the total. The share of suitable territory would go from 81 to 62% in Brazil, and from 56 to 45% in Colombia. Honduras is the most severe case: from 53 to 12%.

Not everyone loses. In Ethiopia, it would rise from 39 to 50%, and the areas of very high suitability would triple (4 to 13%).

These four countries accounted for 58% of world arabica exports in 2023/24. What the report describes therefore does not concern a few marginal regions, but the majority of supply.

It remains to ask who is writing. A bank that lends to the sector does not have the interests of a university team. It does, however, have field data that the latter does not always have. The document reads as a serious projection, not as an established result.

Rabobank, “Climate change redefines suitability and resilience in global arabica coffee production”, March 30, 2026, rabobank.com; Daily Coffee News, Apr. 2, 2026; LC ch. 21

Canephora is often presented as the fallback solution. Its limits are nonetheless measured, and measured on real farms.

Kath and coauthors followed 798 Southeast Asian farms for ten years, and published the result in Global Change Biology in 2020. Ten years of field monitoring do not say the same thing as a stress induced in the laboratory: they measure what the tree does at the grower's.

The yield optimum lies below a mean of 20.5 °C. That is well below the 22-30 °C displayed by the agronomic literature. In other words, the range quoted everywhere is not a yield optimum.

The cost of exceeding it is quantified. Each degree above a minimum of 16.2 °C and a maximum of 24.1 °C costs about 14% of yield, or 350 to 460 kg per hectare. Beyond 25.1 °C, yields are half as high.

This study explains after the fact the sensitivity of the Vietnamese highlands to the 2023-2024 El Niño. Above all, it puts in perspective the idea of a cost-free switch to canephora: the species takes heat better than arabica, but it takes it in yield.

Kath et al. 2020, Global Change Biology 26(6), “Not so robust”, doi 10.1111/gcb.15097