Climate change is coming for your morning cup — and the world's biggest coffee chain is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to stop it.
Starbucks, which operates more coffee locations than any other brand on the planet, has quietly been running one of the most aggressive agricultural investment programs in the food and beverage industry. The reason is straightforward and a little unsettling: the land that grows the coffee the world depends on is disappearing, and it's happening faster than most people realize.
The Problem With Your Morning Ritual
Here's what the projections say. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, more than half of the land currently used to cultivate Arabica beans — the variety that fills Starbucks cups — could be completely unusable by 2050. Rising temperatures, degraded soil and shrinking water supplies are eating away at the prime growing regions of South America, Africa and Indonesia.
Starbucks buys roughly 5 million bags of green Arabica beans every year from more than 400,000 farms. That's about 3 percent of everything the world produces. The countries supplying those beans — Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, Nicaragua and Vietnam among them — are among the most vulnerable to the effects of a changing climate.
Arabica trees are finicky by nature. They grow best in cool mountain climates, typically between 2,000 and 6,500 feet above sea level. Producing a single kilogram of green coffee beans requires up to 2,500 liters of water. And the window in which these trees can thrive is getting narrower every year.
"Farmers have felt the impact of climate change for some time," said Raina Lang, senior director of sustainable coffee at Conservation International, an organization that has been working alongside Starbucks on its sustainability strategy for 25 years.
Higher Ground, Higher Costs
As temperatures climb, coffee growers are being forced to move their operations to higher elevations just to keep conditions right for their trees. That shift brings its own serious consequences. Pushing farming higher up mountainsides accelerates deforestation as growers clear new land. Staying put means increased exposure to pests like the coffee borer beetle, which spreads faster in warmer temperatures and can devastate entire crops.
The financial pressure is already showing up in the market. Average coffee prices hit more than $8.30 per kilogram in 2025, compared to $2.88 back in 2019. A major driver of that spike: severe droughts and irregular rainfall in Brazil and Vietnam, two of the most important coffee-producing countries in the world.
That price volatility is not a temporary blip. It reflects a commodity market that is beginning to price in the reality of an increasingly unstable growing environment.
100 Million Trees and Counting
Starbucks announced on March 26 that it had distributed more than 100 million climate-resilient trees to farmers across El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico over the past nine years. These are not ordinary seedlings. They are strains bred specifically to handle higher temperatures and inconsistent water availability — trees engineered for the world that's coming, not the one that existed when many of these farms were first established.
"The future of coffee depends on action," said Ricardo Arias-Nath, senior vice president of global coffee and tea at Starbucks and president of the company's Latin America and Caribbean operation. "We are investing in farmers, protecting coffee landscapes and scaling solutions that help strengthen resilience across our supply chain."
The program isn't stopping there. Starbucks has announced plans to distribute an additional 50 million trees to farms in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Colombia, though it has not set a public timeline for hitting that target. The company has also distributed 55 million seedlings in Colombia through 2024 and agreed to distribute 2 million seeds and seedlings across Indonesia, where it is simultaneously testing biological pest control methods to combat the coffee borer beetle.
The Lab Behind the Trees
The research behind these tree distributions traces back to a facility in Costa Rica called Hacienda Alsacia. This is Starbucks' agronomic research hub, where scientists test climate-resistant strains drawn from a core collection of 600 coffee varieties. The strains that perform best under heat and drought stress are the ones that eventually make their way to farmers.
Growers don't just receive new trees and get left to figure things out on their own. Starbucks operates a network of 10 Farmer Support Centers and 70 model farms located throughout key growing regions. By the end of 2024, close to 37,000 people had completed training courses through that network, learning updated growing techniques suited to changing conditions.
For years, farmers could also tap into a $100 million loan fund that Starbucks established back in 2000. The fund was designed to help with on-farm improvements and provide advisory services covering business management and financial planning. It ran until May 2025, when it was fully depleted.
Rethinking How Farms Actually Operate
Beyond trees and training, Starbucks is pushing a broader shift in how its supplier farms operate day to day. The company has invested in educating growers about regenerative agricultural practices — techniques that sound almost counterintuitively low-tech but are backed by solid science.
Those practices include planting other crops alongside coffee trees, which helps regulate soil temperature and reduce erosion. Farmers are being encouraged to cut back on fertilizer use and to put the waste from pruning and harvesting to work. By converting that organic material into biochar — a form of charred biomass — farmers can improve soil health and help the ground retain more water between rain events.
These approaches are built into an updated version of the Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices standard, known as CAFE Practices, which Starbucks has used since 2004 to verify its suppliers. Farms that earn certification under that standard receive a price premium above market rate for their beans. That financial incentive is what brings many growers to the table in the first place.
Coffee cultivation itself accounted for 12 percent of Starbucks' entire carbon footprint in 2024. That makes the supply chain a central target of the company's broader environmental goals, which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions, water use and waste in half by 2030.
The Hidden Water Problem
One piece of the supply chain that doesn't get discussed often enough is milling — the process of removing pulp and parchment from the harvested coffee cherry before the beans can be exported. It's a step that most coffee drinkers have never thought about, and it uses a staggering amount of water.
Traditional mills can consume between 10 and 20 liters of water for every single kilogram of beans processed. Starbucks is working to change that by installing newer, more efficient equipment that the company says can reduce water use by up to 80 percent.
More than 1,600 of these systems had been contracted on behalf of Starbucks farmers by the end of 2024. Because mills typically serve multiple farms rather than just one, the impact of each installation is multiplied. A system installed at a cooperative in Mexico three years ago, for example, now serves 9,600 individual growers.
The company has also committed to deploying 20 additional ecomills across Indonesia as part of its recent agreement there, though the total number planned across its full supply chain of roughly 440,000 farms has not been publicly disclosed.
Not Just a Starbucks Problem
Starbucks is not alone in recognizing what's at stake. Nespresso, the premium coffee brand owned by Nestlé, has made similar moves, currently employing 400 agronomists who work directly with 110,000 farmers across 14 countries. Like Starbucks, Nespresso pays farmers a premium to adopt regenerative agriculture practices.
JDE Peet's, the parent company of brands including Peet's Coffee, was acquired on April 1 by Keurig Dr. Pepper. The combined company has indicated plans to spin off a publicly traded entity focused entirely on coffee, which will face the same supply chain pressures when it comes to market.
The challenge facing all of these companies goes beyond purchasing new trees or upgrading equipment. It requires convincing farmers — many of whom have been working the same land using the same methods for generations — to fundamentally change how they operate.
"It actually creates more resilience," said David Linich, a partner at consulting firm PwC, describing the long-term payoff of making these investments.
Conservation International's Lang put it plainly: "We are really encouraging companies to move beyond just compliance. Making these additional investments is really where that will start paying off in terms of building resilience into the supply chain."
What It Means for the Cup
The decisions being made in Costa Rican research stations, on Guatemalan hillsides and in Indonesian processing mills today will determine what coffee looks like — and what it costs — for the next generation of drinkers. The window to get ahead of this problem is narrowing.
The industry knows it. The science says so. And the price of a bag of beans in 2025 compared to what it was six years ago tells the rest of the story.
Starbucks is not framing this as charity. It's framing it as survival — for the farmers, for the supply chain, and ultimately for the product itself. One hundred million trees is a significant commitment. Whether it's enough depends on how quickly the rest of the industry follows, and how fast the climate continues to shift beneath everyone's feet.
