Based on the current climate change trends, the world will lose more than half of its best coffee-growing land.

Brazil, currently the world's largest coffee producer, will see a 79% reduction in its most suitable land for growing coffee.

This is an important recent finding by Swiss scientists whose study assessed the potential impact of climate change on coffee, cashews, and avocados.

All three are crucial globally traded crops produced mainly by smallholder farmers in the tropics.

Coffee is by far the most important traded crop, with projected revenues of $460 billion (£344 billion) in 2022, while avocados and cashews have revenues of $13 billion and $6 billion.

The main message from the new study is that climate change could lead to a significant reduction in the amount of land in the main areas where these crops are currently grown.

In turn, this could affect growers and consumers around the world.

To date, most research on the impact of climate change on the future of food has focused on major staple crops such as wheat, maize, potatoes, and oilseeds grown in temperate regions.

This reflects the tendency of climate scientists to focus on the potentially severe impacts of climate change on temperate ecosystems, specifically changes in temperature and rainfall patterns.

A pivotal innovation of the latest research, which fills in the gaps, is to examine land and soil parameters, as well as purely climatic factors such as temperature and rainfall patterns.

This allows them to predict future trends in greater detail, where climate impacts may alter the suitability of certain tropical regions for growing crops due to changes in factors such as soil pH or texture.

This new study complements other recent research on oil palm. Oil palm remains one of the most important tropical crops in terms of human nutrition, helping feed more than 3 billion people.

Review several modeling analyses of how climate change affects disease incidence and overall mortality in oil palm.

The clear conclusion is that tree mortality will increase significantly after 2050, even wiping out much of the oil palm crop in the Americas.

In addition, the incidence of tree stem rot is projected to increase dramatically throughout Southeast Asia.

Overall, these studies are beginning to reveal the alarming extent and complexity of the impacts of climate change and related factors on tropical crops.

Importantly, impacts will not be evenly distributed, and some regions may benefit from climate change.

For example, parts of Argentina and the United States may become more suitable for growing coffee.

It will be necessary to adapt to ongoing changes, such as shifting the cultivation of specific crops to different regions where climate impacts are more moderate.

However, regardless of mitigation measures, it appears that many tropical crops will become more scarce and more expensive in the future.