Suzanne Shriner remembers the moment she heard the news that coffee leaf rust had been spotted on the island of Maui, just around 100 miles from her farm on the Kona Coast of the island of Hawaii. It was a Friday afternoon in October—seven months into the pandemic—and Hawaii had just re-opened to tourists.

“I got the text and my stomach dropped,” recalls Shriner, who farms with her extended family and serves as president of the Kona Coffee Farmers Association. Like most of her peers, Shriner had been trying to mentally prepare for the moment for a long time. “We’d hoped we would have a few more years,” she says. “But when I learned it was here, I knew we had a massive challenge ahead of us.”

Coffee leaf rust, or Hemileia vastatrix, was first identified in Sri Lanka in the 1860s and has made its way through most of the world’s coffee-growing nations since then. The fungus, which thrives in warm, wet conditions and travels on the wind, debilitates and destroys coffee trees. It’s also one of the biggest factors most scientists point to when they say that climate change is coming for your morning cup of coffee. Read more.