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Climate change is threatening global coffee production, adding 47 days of harmful heat annually across major coffee-growing countries.
This increase in temperature affects coffee quality and yield, leading to higher prices.
Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia and Indonesia, which supply 75% of the world's coffee, are experiencing significant heat stress.
Your daily cup of coffee is getting harder to produce and more expensive to buy and climate change is to blame. A new analysis of 25 coffee-growing countries in the world showed that all of them experienced more coffee-harming heat between 2021 and 2025, potentially affecting the quality and quantity of recent harvests.
The 25 coffee-growing countries and 532 of their districts analysed accounted for about 97 per cent of global coffee production. Each country, on average, experienced 47 additional days per year which saw temperatures harmful to coffee plants, an analysis by Climate Central, a non-profit climate research organisation.
The researchers said that the additional heat days would not have occurred without fossil fuel emissions.
The top five coffee-producing countries — Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia and Indonesia — each experienced 57 extra days of harmful heat per year due to climate change, on average. Together, they supply 75 per cent of the world’s coffee.
Brazil, the world’s top coffee-growing nation, faced an average of 70 extra coffee-harming hot days annually because of climate change.
The countries that saw the most such days were El Salvador (99), Nicaragua (77) and Thailand (75). India, which accounted for 3.5 per cent of global production, observed 30 additional days of heat on average due to climate change, with Kerala experiencing the highest number of such days.
Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world, with more than two billion cups consumed every day. However, global coffee prices have been volatile in recent years, reaching record-high prices in December 2024 and again in February 2025, and extreme weather has contributed to that.
Climate Central analysed actual temperatures from 2021 to 2025 and compared them to a hypothetical world without carbon pollution using the Climate Shift Index. The analysis calculated the additional number of days per year that climate change pushed temperatures above the coffee-harming threshold of 30 degrees Celsius (°C) across the major coffee-producing countries.
Coffee plants thrive under specific temperature and rainfall ranges and when temperatures rise above this threshold, plants experience heat stress that can reduce yield, affect bean quality and increase the vulnerability of plants to disease, the report said, adding that together, these impacts can reduce the supply and quality of coffee and contribute to higher prices globally.
Arabica coffee plants (which account for about 60-70 per cent of the global supply) were more sensitive to heat than robusta varieties. Research showed that even cooler temperatures in the 25-30°C range were suboptimal for arabica growth.
The report pointed out that smaller harvests and higher prices hit smallholder farmers the hardest. Smallholder farmers accounted for about 80 per cent of global producers and about 60 per cent of global supply, but received just 0.36 per cent of the financing needed to adapt to the impacts of climate change in 2021, it said.
Meanwhile, the average cost of adaptation for a one-hectare farm is $2.19 a day, less than the price of a cup of coffee in many countries, it said.
Previous research have warned that unless significant adaptation efforts were implemented, up to half of today’s coffee-growing land could become unsuitable by 2050.