By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Climate change is touching every aspect of our lives – including our daily cups of tea. Kenya and Malawi are the African continent’s largest tea producers and exporters, together accounting for about 27% of global tea trade.
Tea producers in the two countries have already seen what damage climatic shifts can do, as damaging droughts, frost and high temperatures are already becoming more common.
This threatens tea yields and the countries’ economies. It also affects people whose livelihoods are dependent on tea estates and farms, and the wider value chain.
African tea producers have typically not found generic climate projections useful. That’s because these projections focus on changes in average conditions. But tea crop production is at the greatest risk of temperature extremes. Tea growers need information that is specific to the tea variety they grow and where they grow it compared to average temperature and rainfall over a large region.
Knowing what future conditions will be like is particularly important for tea growers, because the tea plant has a long lifespan, of more than 80 years. That means it is critical to take decisions now that will continue to be sound in the future, like replanting with better and resilient cultivars, planting shade trees and crop diversification.
We have developed novel, site-specific climate information for Kenya and Malawi’s tea-growing regions. This, we hope, can better inform tea producers about the range of climate conditions they can expect in the future – specifically, the 2050s and 2080s.
The significant difference in future projected conditions underlines why such tailored climate information is important.
It enables tea farmers and managers to select adaptations that are appropriate for the conditions and the desired outcome. These adaptation options can be selected according to the tea variety that is grown and the scale.
