{"id":521023,"date":"2026-06-27T09:57:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T09:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/521023\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T09:57:36","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T09:57:36","slug":"your-morning-coffee-is-killing-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/521023\/","title":{"rendered":"Your morning coffee is killing the planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the same time, intensive irrigation is lowering the region\u2019s water table, forcing farmers to extend wells as deep as 150\u00a0feet, while intensive chemical use is depleting soils, putting farmers on a \u200b\u201cnutrient treadmill<\/a>\u201d in which they have to spray even more fertilizer and pesticide to maintain their yields. And when natural forests are cleared, the ecological services they provide \u2014 recharging groundwater, controlling erosion, buffering extreme temperatures \u2014 are lost with their trees. \u200b\u201cThe production system is eroding the ecological foundations on which it depends,\u201d the report concluded. Droughts are already creating bean shortages, which contributed to record-high coffee prices<\/a> last year, and as the climate warms, scientists believe half the area\u2019s coffee acres might be unviable by midcentury. That could mean even more deforestation, as production expands elsewhere, and even higher prices.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every caf\u00e9,\u201d Higonnet said.<\/p>\n

Higonnet is a\u00a0badass do-gooder, a\u00a0Yale Law School graduate who was a\u00a0human rights activist for Amnesty International before joining Greenpeace to focus on climate. She got frustrated by Greenpeace\u2019s exclusive focus on the four most prominent deforestation commodities \u2014 beef, soy, palm oil, and wood\/\u200bpaper \u2014 so she helped found a\u00a0well-respected organization called Mighty Earth that works on rubber and cocoa as well as the Big Four; she was knighted by the French government for her efforts to stop child labor and slavery along with deforestation. But she always wanted to expose coffee farming, which also has extreme labor and poverty problems as well as environmental problems, so she started Coffee Watch in late 2024. Coffee is responsible for only about 1% of deforestation, but as she points out, it receives way less than 1% of the attention paid to deforestation.<\/p>\n

The Coffee Watch report does make a\u00a0compelling case that the world\u2019s coffee addiction has destructive consequences for nature. There\u2019s something depressing about losing a\u00a0Luxembourg-sized jungle to farmland in a\u00a0generation. Then again, Luxembourg is just about the size of Rhode Island; around the world, coffee has replaced about a\u00a0New Jersey\u2013sized swath of forest<\/a>. That\u2019s certainly not nothing, but cattle replaced an entire California-size area of forest between 2000 and 2015, more than 200 times what\u2019s been lost in Vietnam, and twice as much as what was lost to all other commodities combined. Globally, pastures now cover an area about twice the size of South America. In the United States, we use about half our agricultural land to produce beef, which only provides about 3% of our calories.<\/p>\n

So yes, we are drinking a\u00a0bit of the Earth, but nowhere near as much of it as we\u2019re eating; the 1% of current deforestation driven by coffee is a\u00a0drop in the pot, compared with the 40% by cattle or the 18% by soy and oil palm. I\u00a0did some crude calculations using this emissions data<\/a>, and it looks like drinking a\u00a0cup of coffee every morning for a\u00a0year contributes about as much to global warming as driving a\u00a0gasoline car 100\u00a0miles \u2014 maybe twice as much if you add milk, but that\u2019s just another reminder that cattle are the real climate menaces. They\u2019re coal plants with\u00a0tails.<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, coffee\u2019s relatively modest impact is no consolation to the Asian unicorn. It would be better for the planet if people drank less coffee. Since that probably won\u2019t happen, because people love coffee, and since lab-grown coffee<\/a> isn\u2019t ready for prime time, there ought to be more pressure on major coffee buyers to green their supply chains. Coffee grows well in the shade of other trees, and while most of the world\u2019s beans come from monocultures, about 20% are now grown through more sustainable agroforestry practices that combine reforestation with production, like planting \u200b\u201cdoughnuts\u201d or \u200b\u201czebra stripes\u201d of trees around or through plantations. Brazil has also reduced deforestation by helping farmers get more efficient; in one generation, they\u2019ve doubled production while reducing their land footprint, and Nestl\u00e9 is developing new climate-resilient varieties<\/a> that could boost yields even further. Governments can also encourage farmers to use less irrigation water and fertilizer, or ban imports of coffee grown on recently deforested land.<\/p>\n

From a\u00a0policy perspective, though, it makes more sense to focus on beef, even if nobody wants to hear that just before firing up the grill on July 4<\/a>. We need to get the rich world to eat less beef, even if that means eating more chicken and pork<\/a>, and helping ranchers produce more beef on less land<\/a>. We have to go hunting where the ducks are. The real lesson of the transformation of the Central Highlands is not that drinking coffee is uniquely damaging to the climate or the environment. It\u2019s that everything we consume does at least some damage \u2014 and until we start taking that seriously, our diets and our farms will keep ravaging the natural world.<\/p>\n

A correction was made on June 26, 2026: This column originally neglected to specify a\u00a0range of time for the damage done by drinking a\u00a0cup of coffee every morning. It has been corrected to specify the time period of a\u00a0year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the same time, intensive irrigation is lowering the region\u2019s water table, forcing farmers to extend wells as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-521023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}