Coffee in a Changing Climate, with Kim Elena Ionescu

Notable Quotes

• “But the first one of those is the elevation consideration and how, as temperatures warm, coffee would have to move up in order to maintain the same flavor characteristics but also the same sort of like a pest and disease resistance. And of course, if you think about the shape of a mountain, there's less land higher up than there is lower down. And even if there was the same amount of land, as a farmer you don't just get to move your farm up the mountain because the climate is changing.” (12:54)
• “So when we're talking about the available land for future production, sometimes we're really talking about deforestation to plant coffee, which is just going to further exacerbate the climate change problem that we already have. There's no good scenario when it comes to warming temperatures.” (13:45)
• “And then as far as coffee’s taste, I would say that we are already tasting the impacts of climate change.” (15:20)

Top of the Stack

References and recommendations made by Kim Elena Ionescu:

• "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things" by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. This week we talk with Kim Elena Ionescu, Chief Sustainability Officer at the Specialty Coffee Association. I'll talk with Kim about how coffee producers are likely to be affected by climate change, how they might adapt, and what resources are available to help them make decisions. We'll also talk about the role that consumers play in this discussion, how Kim got into coffee in the first place, and more. Stay with us.

Kim Elena Ionescu is the Chief Sustainability Officer at the Specialty Coffee Association. She also happens to be one of my oldest and very best friends in the world. So I'm so pleased to have you on Resources Radio Kim, thanks for joining us.

Kim Ionescu: Well, thanks for having me Daniel.

Daniel Raimi: So Kim, we've been friends for a long time and I remember your first job out of college or, correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall that your first job out of college was working in a coffee shop in Durham, North Carolina, near where we grew up. You've stayed in coffee since then and made a career of it and found yourself in the world of sustainability. So how did you kind of find your way into the intersection of coffee and sustainability?

Kim Ionescu: Well I could draw up this story to fill our entire time together, but basically I graduated from college with a liberal arts degree. I was an English and Spanish literature major and I didn't have any postgraduate plan and I didn't get an internship or like a publishing job or anything like that. So I moved back to where we grew up in Durham and I was looking for a job to pay the rent at an apartment that I had with a high school friend. And I went to my favorite bookstore and I asked for a job and I figured as a literature major that was about as good as a plan B as I was going to get. And they didn't hire me.

I didn't really know what to do. But I walked next door and there was a coffee shop there that had just opened and started talking to the barista and it turned out she was the owner. So she took a chance on me and gave me a job and it didn't take long for me working in that job to realize that coffee was really at the intersection of all of these things I was interested in. So it grows all over Latin America and I was interested in Latin America and Latin American literature and politics. There are a lot of social justice issues, which is another thing that I was very interested in at the time. I think I probably wouldn't have said, if you'd asked me in 2003, that I was interested in sustainability. I think that I would have said that I was interested in social justice and environmental conservation and politics.

And now I see all those things wrapped up in this title of sustainability. But that's really how I became more interested in coffee than just in that particular barista job that I had. So, after a few months in the coffee shop, I got a job at a coffee roasting company (also in Durham, North Carolina), which at the time was a pretty small company. And then I spent about 11 years there. And while I was there, that small company—Counter Culture, Counter Culture Coffee is the name of the company—really grew to be this national brand and a real leader in the specialty coffee industry. And sometime during that 11 years or so, they decided they needed a sustainability manager of some kind. Someone to really codify their commitment to sustainability as a company.

I've joked before that it's like they looked around and I was the most sustainable looking person at the company. I drove a car that ran on biodiesel and I was always badgering people about separating the recyclables from their trash. And so they gave me this sustainability job and I didn't really know what to do with it. But after some years and some research and some trial and error, I got a sense of it—and then I really came to love it.

Then about three years ago, I left Counter Culture and I joined the Specialty Coffee Association as their first ever sustainability hire. So it was a role I felt ready for because I'd been in that position before, paving my own path.

Daniel Raimi: That's fantastic. I don't think I realized that you were initially looking for a job at the bookstore. That must've been The Regulator Bookshop.

Kim Ionescu: It was The Regulator Bookshop. And I've had a chance since then to give a hard time to the person who didn't give me a job application.

Daniel Raimi: That's great.

Kim Ionescu: But I thank him. Actually, I was like, this is probably a good thing for me in the long run. I wouldn't have a career otherwise.

Daniel Raimi: Right, right. So we're going to talk about your work in sustainability and kind of with a focus on climate change today. But before we get into that, can you tell us a little bit about the organization that you work for now? The Specialty Coffee Association or the SCA? Who are your members? And, can you tell us what specialty coffee is and how it might be different from non-specialty coffee or normal coffee or—I don't know what the word would be for coffee that is not specialty coffee.

Kim Ionescu: Yeah, depending on the context of the conversation, we usually would call it commercial coffee or commodity coffee. Commodity is a little bit more a derogatory. There's like a little slight in there if you say it's commodity-grade coffee. But to answer your first question, the Specialty Coffee Association is a membership association for the coffee industry. It's been around since somewhere in the early '80s. And it was born out of a group of volunteers coming together and wanting to distinguish themselves from that commodity or commercial coffee. So, recognizing that coffee can be many, many different things and that there's a whole range of levels of quality and there's an enormous diversity and beauty and coffee.

And I think that, at the time, that probably felt very unusual and I think that those early volunteers felt like maybe a little bit like revolutionaries in the message that they were trying to get out there to the broad audience of coffee drinkers who expected coffee to be ubiquitous and for coffee to be cheap. And now I think that we could pick all sorts of examples from craft beer to other artisanal food products and realize that, well, yeah, of course—like all cheese isn't commercial, manufactured blocks of cheese. Of course there's this whole gradient. But it took a long time for that message to really grow. And now the association is about 10,000–11,000 members, and around a 100 countries we represent.

But even beyond the members—so, people who are owners of coffee businesses or baristas or coffee farmers—I think there are people who see themselves as stakeholders to specialty coffee who are not members of the association, but we really count them in the community that we represent and that we try to bring together to make coffee better and to make better coffee.

I haven't gotten much into the details of what defined specialty versus non-specialty. And that's because I think that as specialty coffee continues to grow, we see that these really rigid definitions of exactly how it has to taste or score on a scale that is determined by professional coffee tasters doesn't represent the kind of magnitude or the promise of specialty coffee being something that is about coffee that tastes better and also coffee that is better for everyone involved—from the producer of that coffee or even the worker on a coffee farm to the person who is ultimately brewing the coffee and handing it to you in your local coffee shop.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. So that's so interesting—so there might be some technical ways to evaluate this type of stuff. But we're not going to focus on that. And the standards are changing. It sounds like your organization is kind of trying to broaden the conversation a little bit.

Kim Ionescu: Yeah. It's not something [...] I don't know a single coffee drinker who's ever gone into a coffee shop and asked for a cup of specialty coffee. So it's really sort of a professional designation, and one that I think is very relevant—but not necessarily as a word the most consumer friendly.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So let's get into talking about some of these environmental issues and climate change in particular. It seems to me as someone who knows virtually nothing about how coffee is grown, before we can talk about the impacts of climate change on growing coffee or other aspects of the value chain, it would be useful to get a basic sense of what are the characteristics that make a particular place well-suited for growing coffee, whether that has to do with geography or climate or other factors.

Kim Ionescu: Yeah. Coffee's a funny plant in some ways because it is hardy or hardy enough to be grown in something like 60 countries around the world. But at the same time it's also delicate because it requires this specific combination of climate and elevation—and especially elevation if we're talking about coffee that tastes really good—in order to really thrive. So, of these 60 plus countries, they're all located in the tropics. So people ask sometimes if we grow coffee in the United States, and the trick answer to that is that we do, but it's in Hawaii and maybe a little bit in California, actually, which is a subject for another podcast.

Daniel Raimi: Okay.

Kim Ionescu: But we don't commercially grow that much coffee in the United States. We import most of it. And most of the coffee that we import comes from, well, Latin America is the largest producing region for coffee, but also Southeast Asia [and] Africa. And the better tasting coffee tends to come from higher elevations—so, about 1,000 meters (or 3,000 feet-ish) and up from there to about 2,000 meters or so. Those are the coffees that we're really looking for, especially when we're talking about the specialty coffees or the coffees that tend to fetch premiums in the marketplace and be more lucrative for producers to grow than the commodity-grade coffees.

These are the preconditions for coffee to thrive and to taste good and to be relatively resistant to disease and pests that flourish at lower elevations. But climate change is introducing a lot of uncertainty to not only the places where coffee can grow—because as the general global temperatures warm, then some of those lower elevations are becoming less suitable for coffee and more vulnerable to pest and disease. But also changing things like the weather patterns that determine when coffee flowers. And based on when coffee flowers, that determines when the coffee seeds—which are the beans that we know how those ripen and the fruits around them—how those grow and mature and whether or not they ripen evenly or unevenly and what the yield can be.

So there are all of these factors that are changed when rains come at times that farmers aren't expecting them. And most coffee is irrigated by rain. So we have a real dependence in coffee on regular weather patterns.

Daniel Raimi: You mentioned already, Kim, a couple of elements of climate change that might affect growing conditions for coffee. Can you say a little bit more about what we know at this point about how climate change is likely to affect coffee production levels or maybe coffee flavor in some of the major producing regions? And I know that's, like, an enormous question and really hard to answer succinctly. But I'm going to ask you to just try to do it and maybe give us a sense of the net impacts to production and flavor in different growing parts of the coffee world.

Kim Ionescu: I think that there are a few major ways in which we see it happening and none of them are really good, which is not surprising, probably. But the first one of those is the elevation consideration and how, as temperatures warm, coffee would have to move up in order to maintain the same flavor characteristics but also the same sort of pest and disease resistance. And, of course, if you think about the shape of a mountain, there's less land higher up than there is lower down. And even if there was the same amount of land—as a farmer, you don't just get to move your farm up the mountain because the climate is changing.

And oftentimes even one further complexity in that particular mountain scenario is that oftentimes the land that's above coffee production—because 2,000 meters is pretty high in tropical regions—a lot of time that land is a in conservation or in some sort of virgin forest. So when we're talking about the available land for future production, sometimes we're really talking about deforestation to plant coffee, which is just going to further exacerbate the climate change problem that we already have. There's no good scenario when it comes to warming temperatures.

But then there's also that climatic change piece, and that's what we've seen as problematic—even more problematic, thus far, is that farmers aren't able to count on the same kind of seasonal weather patterns that they have in previous generations. And that uncertainty has consequences, not only in environmental terms but also substantial ones in economic and social terms. So a lot of growers right now, the outcry—there's been over the past couple of years, an increasing pressure from coffee producers worldwide on the industry about the state of coffee prices currently.

And the conversation has really been driven by the economics of coffee production and how unprofitable coffee farming is. And while we're having this economic conversation, all the while in the background are the impacts of climate change and how it's impossible to plan and how when we are talking about yields and we're talking about the amount of coffee that's available on a tree for coffee pickers—we're really talking about economic and social issues as well as environmental issues, which is where I think climate change is often [...] we approach it from an environmental perspective, but it's got much bigger implications in coffee.

And then as far as coffee’s taste, I would say that we are already tasting the impacts of climate change. And it's a funny thing to know because—at the same time that I can say confidently that we are losing some of the genetic diversity in coffee that contributes to really exceptional and unique tasting coffees—we're also seeing, on the flip side of things, more interesting and unusual coffees available than ever before because of the growth of the specialty coffee market and the access to technology that coffee growers have. So it can be, like, there's a little bit of a cognitive dissonancethere, where coffee in some ways is better than it's ever been but at the same time it's also at greater risk than it's ever been at.

Daniel Raimi: This issue, Kim, of uncertainty and trying to anticipate weather patterns is a really fascinating one to me. And correct me if I'm wrong, but from my conversations with you previously, most coffee producers are small landowners. They're often in relatively low-income parts of the world. And I would imagine that it can be difficult for them to get high-quality information on things like near-term or long-term changing weather patterns or other information, like how they might be able to adapt to changes in the weather, whether they're short term or long term.

Whereas, if I think about in the United States or some of these large landowner farming operations—they're very technologically sophisticated, they have access to lots of great information. How do these smaller landowners in the coffee world gain access to information and how do they use it to try to adapt to changing climate conditions that are maybe opaque to them?

Kim Ionescu: Well, first of all, you're right that most coffee producers in the world are smallholder farmers. That's unusual. And it's something that I really love about coffee and that I would like to see continue into the future. But you're also alluding to the vulnerability of being a smallholder farmer, especially in a rural tropical area in an economy that is less developed than, say, the United States. So they have a lot of cards stacked against them already. And the access to information is one big obstacle. And many of the producing countries, to break it up into, like, producing countries and consuming countries—that's not a totally fair dichotomy but, for a coffee—

Daniel Raimi: Right..

Kim Ionescu: For producing countries, there's a lot of knowledge in producing countries at the government level or research institutions that have a lot ofbackground and a lot of local context. But what a lot of them don't have is funding. And that can be true at the institutional level when we're talking about a research arm of the government in a coffee-producing country. And that's equally true at the individual producer level. So there are just as many instances of smallholder farmers knowing what climate change is doing to their farm currently, and being able to anticipate what will happen in the future and knowing what kind of changes to make—but not being able to do it because there's no funding for that.

And that brings us back again to the economic side of climate change where, if you're struggling to make ends meet on your coffee farm already—at current market prices, at the volumes that you're producing, as a smallholder, as costs are increasing (kind of across the board for all of the inputs that you need to farm), and the cost of labor is increasing as the economy develops—because as all of these things happen, there are no resources to go out and get new varieties of coffee, new coffee seedlings, and plant those and wait three to five years for those little seedlings, because coffee is a perennial crop. To produce a first full harvest and then hope that the way that that coffee tastes and the yields are sufficient to repay the cost of planting them, it's a lot to ask at an individual level, especially of a small-scale farmer.

Daniel Raimi: Right. And so you mentioned earlier that farmers could theoretically move their farms up the mountain to adapt. You mentioned trying out new varieties in terms of planting different types of coffee. What are some other adaptation options for these farmers as climatic conditions continue to change? And do you have a sense of how realistic it is to expect these small landowners to actually make those adaptations?

Kim Ionescu: Yeah, I think if we were speaking on an individual smallholder level, then the expectations are pretty unrealistic that the collective “we” would have of them being able to do much. But if we think about it at an industry level, then, yeah—I think there are certainly things that we can expect and that we can plan for and that we should plan for. And those include the development of new coffee varieties. Because, although I mentioned just a second ago the loss of genetic diversity, I'm not sure that was quite the right phrase to use because we actually have a huge problem in coffee that we don't have a lot of genetic diversity. We kind of have a genetic bottleneck.

We're losing some varieties that are less suited to growing coffee in lower elevations and more delicate. But that's partly due to the pressure that climate change is putting on coffee production and those sort of economic pressures. So I think that, at the coffee industry level, in some ways we've never been better off—or we've seen enormous growth over the past 20 years. And we're seeing a lot of calls by individual companies, by a consortium of companies and nonprofit organizations, and sometimes the public sector also for industry to invest some of the returns of this growth that we've seen into industry preservation.

And that can be in the form of developing new varieties or large-scale adaptation when it comes to who would finance some kind of different agricultural extension that was more about climate-smart agriculture and promoting resilience than about promoting productivity, which has been the thrust of most coffee investment over the past couple of decades—it’s been in increasing the productivity of coffee farms. And there's a limit to how much higher yields are going to bring in higher incomes and how much those higher incomes can be expected to offset the effects of climate change.

So, I think that those are the kinds of things that will really determine whether or not coffee is able to adapt in the places that are more vulnerable. So in those more rural areas where producers aren't relying on economies of scale and are making a decision between investing in coffee and transitioning into growing something else or transitioning out of agricultural altogether to take a job in a developing city nearby, where there is to be had as a security guard or something.

Daniel Raimi: That makes sense. So, in your role now, you travel quite a bit. And in your previous role at Counter Culture, I know you traveled extensively around the world to South America, East Africa, Indonesia, all over the place to these really fascinating places and meeting lots of fascinating people. Are there any stories that kind of stick with you from those travels about how specific communities are thinking about dealing with these problems or maybe stories that stick with you about how organizations like yours umbrella, and larger organizations, or working with these small communities to try to manage the likely future effects of climate change?

Kim Ionescu: Yeah. I guess for me, I think often about how much knowledge exists in coffee-producing communities. And it's hard to talk about that without feeling like I'm advancing some sort of narrative in which farmers are these, like, folk heroes, which is something that makes me uncomfortable and I don't want to further that. There was enough of that in the world. But I think about that because for much of the time that I've been traveling as a coffee buyer and now as a Chief Sustainability Officer, I think that even sometimes in, or it just [...] I guess I think about the dynamics between coffee buyers and coffee sellers and how—even though farmers have all of this knowledge of what's happening to their farms and ideas about what might work on their farms—that they really need the buy-in of coffee buyers, the ones with power, the ones with more resources, the ones who have the link to the coffee consumer who needs to be a part of this conversation in some way too.

That's not the core audience for the Specialty Coffee Association. And I think about how to build that buy-in. How do you use coffee to build relationships across supply chains in the same way that we use coffee as a means of connecting with our friends? When we meet for coffee and we sit down over coffee, how do we use these coffee relationships and these coffee value chains as a way in which to pilot a different way of approaching climate change and agriculture? Because I think that that potential exists. I think about how 20 years ago, when I started selling coffee at a coffee shop on my college campus, I was a fair trade advocate even though I didn't actually really know what fair trade meant and I didn't drink coffee at the time. I just knew that fair trade coffee was the right thing.

And it was really coffee that introduced “fair trade” into the consumer lexicon. And there's still a lot of confusion. I'm not saying that everyone knows exactly what that means or doesn't call it “free-trade” coffee sometimes. But I think that coffee has this opportunity and I want to continue to use the experiences and the sort of the knowledge of coffee-producing communities to drive that more and to build the buy-in of the rest of the industry and of consumers into what needs to be done—as opposed to telling consumers to look to their governments or to look to industry for information about what's going to work best in their very specific local context.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Yeah. So, like, leveraging the power of consumer demand to make a difference in that way.

Kim Ionescu: And again, just to shift that power dynamic. It's ambitious and it's not like it's going to happen overnight. But, it seems like if we can do it then coffee might be the product to do it because it's so specific. We don't go, as much as we love chocolate, most of us don't go to a special chocolate shop every day on our way to work to get our special chocolate from our special chocolate preparer person. And many of us do that with coffee. Coffee does really hold a special place in a lot of our lives.

Daniel Raimi: Well I know it plays a crucial role in my everyday life, and I imagine the everyday lives of many people listening. And your recommendations on coffee have actually made a big difference for me. The quality of coffee I drink is much higher because you are my friend and I'm grateful for that among many other things. We're going to wrap it up today by asking you the same question that we ask all of our guests, which is: What is at the top of your reading stack? So what's something that you've read or watched or heard recently related to sustainability or other topics that you work on that you think is really interesting and that you would recommend to our listeners?

Kim Ionescu: I was thinking about this and I've read a lot of articles about coffee or about smallholder agriculture that I like. But what I decided that I wanted to recommend is kind of an old book in business sustainability terms, which is Cradle to Cradle. I don't know if you read that one.

Daniel Raimi: No.

Kim Ionescu: But it's 20-something years old now, written in the '90s. And I only read it recently because my husband read it from a, or started it maybe, from a design perspective and I thought, "Oh, this is such a classic of business sustainability." Kind of like natural capital or what else? There are a couple of other ones that I feel like constantly get recommended as, like, the business sustainability intro books. And I hadn't read that one and it just, the whole time I was reading it I thought—wow, first of all, so much of this is so true still and I feel like we're still having the same conversation. And it was all written down here 25 years ago.

And then another part of it that really has stuck with me is just this idea of instead of trying to design solutions to the symptoms of problems, to really look at how a system was designed and whether or not we're trying to fix a system that isn't broken. In fact, it's working exactly like it was designed to work. We just know now that it was the wrong system to build. So it's not actually about fixing something, it's about completely starting over and completely rethinking what it is that we want to build so that we build it right from the beginning.

Daniel Raimi: And so that's Cradle to Cradle?

Kim Ionescu: Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough.

Daniel Raimi: Excellent. Well thank you so much, Kim, for that recommendation and for sharing your expertise on coffee and of course for your friendship and for joining us today on Resources Radio.

Kim Ionescu: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the participants. They do not necessarily represent the views of Resources for the Future, which does not take institutional positions on public policies. Resources Radio is produced by Kate Peterson with music by Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.