✉️ This story was featured in this week’s Coffee News Club
👋 Get the Coffee News Club newsletter in your inbox weekly—sign up.
One of the coffee industry’s most widely accepted beliefs is that robusta is more resilient than arabica. Our newsletter often features stories of farmers planting robusta as a way to combat climate change: for example, we featured a story from Bloomberg about Brazilian farmers switching to robusta due to its perceived hardiness.
But that belief isn’t necessarily backed up by science, and a new study throws further doubt on claims of robusta’s resilience.
Published in the journal Sustainable Development, researchers examined more than 50 studies on climate change’s impact on coffee. The authors found that the idea that robusta is more resilient than arabica “is not supported by scientific evidence.”
Many of the studies on robusta and climate change were flawed, the authors wrote, and those shortcomings “have led to misleading assessments and assumptions.” The researchers found that robusta production is less drought-tolerant than assumed and thrives only in areas like Brazil and Vietnam because of large-scale irrigation.
The idea that robusta is more resilient than arabica is an “internet myth,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Aaron Davis from the UK’s Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, told Reuters. The misunderstanding emerged about a decade ago, Davis said. “I found it troubling that people weren’t interpreting the science correctly and that they were advocating robusta as the savior of the coffee sector under climate change.”
Davis did note that robusta is more heat-tolerant than arabica, although even there the news isn’t as positive as many thought. A 2020 study found that robusta’s ideal growing temperature is lower than previously assumed, with every 1°C increase leading to a roughly 14% decline in yield.
Read more on the robusta climate resilience myth here.
Photo by Helena Coffee Vietnam on Unsplash
