Coffee is the third most consumed beverage in the world, after water and tea, and is second only to oil as the globe’s most traded commodity. However, like other necessary commodities, a warming world is having a negative effect on the beverage.
A study in 2017 suggested coffee growing regions globally could shrink by 88 percent by 2050, due to climate change. The study was conducted by David Roubik, an entomologist and senior staff scientist for ecology, behavior, and evolution at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
There are two varieties of coffee: “robusta,” which as the name implies, is more robust and tolerates a wider range of soils and temperatures, and “Arabica,” which is way less tolerant. Arabica is the variety of choice for most coffee drinkers, adding a bit of stress to an already stressful situation.
Meet Coffea stenophylla
Actually, Coffea stenophylla was first discovered by Swedish botanist Adam Afzelius in Sierra Leone in the 18th century. A sample of seeds was obtained by Sir William H. Quayle Jones, the Deputy Governor of Sierra Leone, in 1894. The plant was cultivated by the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, and samples were sent to Trinidad.
J. H. Hart, F.L.S, the Superintendent of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Trinidad, reported in 1898 that the plants had fruited for the first time, four years from being planted. He described the flavor of the prepared cup of coffee as excellent, and equal to the finest Coffea arabica.
Botanist Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew says the stenophylla plants were cultivated in different parts of Africa and exported to Europe until the early 20th century when the robusta coffee plant was introduced. Once cultivation of the stenophylla plant was abandoned, they literally disappeared.
Stenophylla has not been seen in the wild in Sierra Leone since 1954 and anywhere since the 1980s in Ivory Coast. But Davis, who led a study published in the journal Nature Plants, was part of a group of researchers who searched for stenophylla in the wild.
Davis, along with study co-authors Jeremy Haggar of the University of Greenwich and coffee development specialist Daniel Sarmu, initially spotted a single plant in central Sierra Leone. About 140 kilometers (87 miles) away in southeastern Sierra Leone, they found a healthy wild stenophylla population.
The nice thing about the stenophylla coffee plant is that it grows at a mean annual temperature of 24.9 C — 1.9 degrees higher than robusta coffee and up to 6.8 C higher than Arabica coffee, the researchers said.
This “rediscovery,” Davis said, may help in the “future-proofing” of a coffee industry that supports the economy of several tropical countries and provides livelihoods for more than 100 million farmers. There are 124 known coffee species, though Arabica and robusta dominate the market.
“To find a wild coffee that tastes great and is heat and drought tolerant is the holy grail of coffee breeding,” Davis told the BBC. “Being somebody who’s tasted a lot of wild coffees – they’re not great, they don’t taste like Arabica so our expectations were pretty low.”
“And we were completely blown away by the fact that this coffee tasted amazing. It has these other attributes related to its climate tolerance: it will grow and crop under much warmer conditions than Arabica coffee.”
As for the future of this coffee plant, seedlings are being planted this year in order to start assessing the wild coffee’s potential as a replacement for less heat-tolerant plants.
“It’s not going to be in coffee shops in the next couple of years, but I think within five to seven years we’ll see it entering the market as a niche coffee, as a high-value coffee, and then after that I think it will be more common,” he said.
