'Adaptation strategies' needed now as climate change shifts crop production: Study

Coffee beans, avocados and cashews are among the global staples affected by climate change.

This is an Inside Science story.

Some countries that grow coffee, cashews and avocados will see the amount of land best suited to these crops shrink because of climate change, highlighting the need to plan adaptations now, according to new work published last week in the journal PLOS One.

The crops we eat depend on a variety of soil and climate conditions to grow, and climate change is expected to affect both temperature and rainfall in many areas around the world. Previous research has looked at how crops would be affected by these changes, and the findings spell trouble for some, including coffee.

To find out where the best growing conditions for coffee, cashews and avocados are today, environmental systems scientist Roman Grüter and his colleagues combined information about what conditions these crops prefer with maps of current climate data and different soil or land types. Then, by incorporating climate models, they predicted where conditions would improve and where they would decline. The final maps were precise enough that Grüter, affiliated with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and an author of the new study, could zoom in to less than a square kilometer in resolution.