More than a billion cups of coffee are poured worldwide every day. Coffee became so wildly popular and struck roots even inside the cultures that are historically far from the endemic area of coffee growth. Not everyone is aware that coffee is one of the most vulnerable commodities for the influence of climate warming. One of the most popular sorts of coffee (The Arabica) is very sensitive to increased temperatures especially during blossoming. When it comes to relationship between coffee and climate, farmers acknowledge devastating effects of global warming not less than scientists do. The recent research of Marketwatch has shown that over 90% of coffee farmers in Colombia had noticed changes in air temperature and 74% mentioned that droughts are now worse than they used to be. Meanwhile farmers are struggling to adapt to new climate conditions, soon we need to loosen purse-strings for our coffee budget. Get prepared, coffee prices will rise on ~25% by the end of this year. In this context, using the simple plot above, we emphasize how quickly the global warming hits our pockets via drought. A global mean of drought index called scPDSI exhibits impressively good performance (84% agreement) in predicting the coffee price of the upcoming year. The existence of such indices is one of the main reasons why we also should improve the global meteorological monitoring system and put more efforts in developing numerical models predicting drought conditions.
Data Description: scPDSI - Self Calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index Data link (drought): https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/drought/
Date link (coffee price):https://fred.stlouisfed.org