Can scientists save your morning cup of coffee?

CAFFEINE is one of the world’s most popular drugs, and coffee one of its best-loved delivery mechanisms. It is grown in more than 70 countries; more than 2bn cups are drunk each day. It helps support the livelihoods of an estimated 125m people. It indirectly supports many more, including your Californian correspondent (though not his tea-drinking British editor), by supplying them with a jump-start every morning.

But global warming threatens the world’s coffee supply. Temperatures are rising and rainfall patterns shifting across South America, central Africa and South-East Asia, where most of the world’s coffee is grown. By the end of the century between 35% and 75% of the coffee-growing land in Brazil, the world’s biggest producer, could be unusable, according to a recent paper published in Science of the Total Environment by Cássia Gabriele Dias, an agricultural engineer at the Federal University of Itajubá, in Brazil.