News

An exploration of how genetic development can produce a coffee tree that might save the day. Is there a wild coffee tree happily growing in the forests somewhere that could be our silver bullet? What about if we mix existing documented species together? Featuring WCR’s Hanna Neuschwander, Aaron Davis of Kew Gardens, Sarada Krishnan, and Bernard Gichimu.

The world’s top coffee-producing nations all lie at similar tropical latitudes, where even small rises in temperature are forecast to have severe consequences for people and agriculture. But as the FT’s Nic Fildes reports, in Australia scientists are tackling the problem by trying to develop a better, hardier coffee bean as a part of WCR’s International Multi-location Variety Trial (IMLVT) program.