Year after year meteorologists report that average global temperatures have hit another high for the modern era. Considering that what is today the frozen arctic once supported palm trees we have wondered if growing coffee on the arctic tundra will one day be possible. But what would extreme climate change do to coffee production? Last year we asked if climate change could destroy coffee production.

Higher temperatures, more chaotic weather patterns, droughts and floods we become the norm as the world climate change, according to experts. The Tech Times writes about the effect of climate change on agriculture.

As average global temperatures begin to rise due to human activity, scientists say the drastic effects of climate change continue to take effect all over the world.

One of the most severely affected sectors is the field of agriculture. In the past decades, extreme weather conditions caused by climate change have disrupted global food production.

The researchers found that global cereal production was as much as 10% lower in the last twenty years. However, there appears to be a “fertilizer” effect of higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The problem for coffee is that the fertilizer effect would not reduce the risk of leaf rust or help when crops are washed out by floods or die because of drought. Climate change may not destroy coffee production but it may well reduce it.

What should coffee producers do? Phy.org reports that Nicaragua focuses on climate change resistant coffee.

With climate change threatening crops in many parts of the world, Nicaragua is turning to a robust variety of coffee bean to protect one of its key exports.

The appropriately named robusta coffee comes from the Coffea canephora plant, which is being increasingly planted in the Central American country under government authorization.

The sturdy variety is easier to care for, higher in caffeine, faster to produce fruit and more disease-resistant than the more popular Arabica sort Nicaragua traditionally grows-although it is of lower quality, fetching a lower price.

However, its advantages make it better suited to ride out climate change and bring benefits to smaller producers, industry groups say.

“Robusta coffee production has proven its profitability through its high productivity, low production costs and high potential,” says Luis Chamorro, an executive with the Mercon group, which plans to plant the variety on 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) it owns on the eastern side of the country.

The problem for many producers is that they grow high quality Arabica coffee and not the more disease resistant but lower quality Robusta. An alternative approach has been taken by the Colombian coffee growers association in regard to one of the threat of climate change which is coffee leaf rust. They have simply bred high quality Arabica coffee strains that are leaf rust resistant.

When coffee leaf rust swept into Latin America the Colombian coffee research organization, Cenicafé started work on producing a Colombian leaf rust resistant coffee. This was in the 1980s. Today Colombian leaf rust resistant coffee comes in two varieties, Colombian and Castillo. The first is a cross between an old Colombian variety, Caturra, and a rust-resistant strain from Southeast Asia, the Timor hybrid. Castillo is an offshoot of further cross breeding of the first Colombian leaf rust resistant coffee strain. Replanting with Colombian leaf rust resistant coffee in Colombia has reduced the incidence of leaf rust from 40% to 5% from 2011 to 2013.

The bottom line is that traditional coffee producers are working to adapt to expected climate change with modifications of what they plant and new strains of coffee.