Good To The Last Drop? Coffee & Climate with Aaron Davis
Mar 2, 2022
Coffee is one of the most widely-consumed beverages in the world. But with climate change threatening the world's two main coffee species, will that change?
Coffee scientist and researcher Dr. Aaron Davis says even with rising temperatures, and more drought -- that doesn’t have to be the case. This week on What About Water? we hear why reintroducing forgotten wild coffee species will be the key to growing enough coffee in the future.
In this episode, Jay learns
about the professional coffee-tasting process and just how much
flavor factors into the equation for coffee farmers’ bottom
lines.
On
the Last Word we meet Daniel Sarmu, a coffee development specialist
in Sierra Leone who is helping small farmers grow heat-tolerant
Stenophylla coffee. He is also searching for more Stenophylla
coffee trees in the wild.
Aaron Davis
Dr. Aaron
Davis is the Senior Research Leader of Plant Resources at the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK). Davis is the leading authority on coffee
species and has traveled widely to countries in Africa to study
coffee in the wild. His team at Kew is dedicated to the identification and
understanding of the beneficial traits of crops and associated
organisms, particularly within the context of environmental stress
resilience and climate change.
Davis’ work on coffee spans over 30 years, and
includes the naming and classification of coffee species, molecular
(DNA) studies, conservation, climate change and resilience, and
sustainable development. More recently he has published research on
the value of wild coffee species (and diversity) for the
sustainability of the global coffee sector. Ongoing and new work
includes the development of climate resilience methods and the use
of wild coffee species for the development of next-generation
coffee crops.
Daniel
Sarmu
Daniel
Sarmu is a Coffee Development Specialist from Kenema, Sierra Leone.
He has worked in the development world for over 20 years, primarily
in agriculture, helping small farmers maximize their profits in the
coffee industry. In 2018, Daniel re-discovered the long-forgotten
Stenophylla coffee plant in the hills of Sierra Leone alongside Dr.
Jeremy Hagar and Aaron Davis. In recent years, Daniel has also
written Sierra Leone’s coffee policy and is putting finishing
touches on it so that small farmers across the country can use
it.