Essay by Eric Worrall
Our heroic coffee explorers trek through the remote African wilderness, searching for species that can withstand global warming.
To survive climate change, coffee must embrace new and resilient coffee beans
By Marissa Garcia
June 9, 2022 at 8 a.m. EDTThe team’s mission is as lofty as the mountains they shrunk in December 2018. Their mission? To find a coffee species not seen for nearly 70 years in Sierra Leone.
This species, although lost to the wild, continues to live in the textbooks. Daniel Sarmu, a local researcher on the team, searched from “field to field” for four years. If any particular plant species caught his eye, he would collect a sample, hoping it would be a lost species. But every genetic test came back negative; the search continues.
Until the 2018 expedition, when researchers found a factory of Coffea stenophylla in the Kasewe Hills has been largely deforested.
Bittersweet moments. To regrow the elusive species, they needed to cross one plant with another – but a second stenophylla did not appear. A few days later, they ventured to Kambui Hills. After just an hour of hiking – a significant drop from Sarmu’s four-year search – they discovered 20 species of plants. At all life stages, stenophylla thrives: seedlings, saplings and trees.
“Then we knew we had to build something to rescue this species,” recalls Jeremy Haggar, a researcher on the team and professor of agronomy at the University of Greenwich.
…
Let’s hope our intrepid explorers discover their magic bean.
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