Nearly every major coffee-producing country is now enduring significantly more days of heat that harms coffee plants, according to a new global attribution analysis from Climate Central released on 18 February 2026 in Princeton, New Jersey.
The study, titled More Coffee-Harming Heat Due to Carbon Pollution, found that all 25 coffee-growing countries analyzed, representing 97% of global production, experienced additional coffee-harming heat because of climate change. On average, each country had 47 extra days per year with temperatures beyond 30°C that are extremely harmful for arabica and suboptimal for robusta, days that Climate Central says “would not have occurred without fossil fuel pollution” in the 2021–2025 period.
For the world’s five largest producers – Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia and Indonesia – Climate Central reported an average of 57 extra harmful heat days per year due to climate change. Together, these five origins supply about 75% of the world’s coffee, linking the new climate patterns directly to global supply regions.
The impact is particularly pronounced in Brazil, the world’s top coffee producer. In its press release, Climate Central said Brazil faced an average of 70 additional coffee-harming hot days annually because of climate change, while its key coffee state of Minas Gerais experienced an extra 67 such days each year. Reporting on the same analysis, Daily Coffee News noted that Indonesia averaged about 73 additional harmful heat days, Vietnam 59, Colombia 48 and Ethiopia 34.
The increases are even steeper in some smaller but significant coffee origins. Daily Coffee News reported that El Salvador saw about 99 extra harmful heat days per year, Nicaragua about 77 and Thailand about 75, based on the Climate Central data. In India, Frontline reported that coffee regions averaged 118 coffee-harming heat days annually between 2021 and 2025, of which 30 days were attributable to climate change; in a world without carbon pollution, India would have had roughly 88 such days instead of 118.
Heat stress is already visible on the ground. In the embargoed press material, Dejene Dadi, general manager of Ethiopia’s Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperatives Union (OCFCU), said that coffee farmers in Ethiopia are already seeing the impact of extreme heat and that Ethiopian arabica is particularly sensitive to direct sunlight without sufficient shade. Explaining the biological mechanism, evolutionary biologist Lily Peck of the University of California, Los Angeles told Yahoo News Canada that extreme heat forces plants to divert resources from general functions to focus on survival, leaving them more susceptible to disease.
Climate Central links these agronomic stresses to global consumption patterns. In the press release, the organization estimated that 2.2 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day worldwide. In an email interview cited by Frontline, Climate Central’s vice president for science, Dr. Kristina Dahl, described coffee as “one of the most popular beverages in the world and a daily staple for billions of people” and called it a “very direct and tangible link between climate change and everyday life.”
Dahl stated in the press release that “climate change is coming for our coffee,” noting that nearly every major coffee-producing country is now experiencing more days of extreme heat that can harm coffee plants, reduce yields and affect quality. She added that, in time, these impacts may ripple outward from farms to consumers, affecting the quality and cost of daily coffee.
The new analysis also highlights financial vulnerabilities among producers. Climate Central reported that smallholder farmers account for about 80% of global coffee producers and about 60% of global supply, yet they received just 0.36% of the financing needed to adapt to climate impacts in 2021. The organization calculated that the average cost of adaptation for a one-hectare coffee farm is US$2.19 per day, which it pointed out is less than the price of a cup of coffee in many countries.
Beyond current heat stress, several sources referenced by the study point to longer-term constraints on coffee geography. Yahoo News Canada, citing Climate Central, reported that without interventions, land suitable for coffee growth could be reduced by up to 50% by 2050, a figure that Frontline also cited in its coverage of India’s coffee sector.
