Coffee Comes to Palermo, and Climate Change Comes With It

Coffee has no business in Sicily, at least not in the old agricultural map. Yet on the outskirts of Palermo, the map has been rewritten by warmer temperatures, and the result is Italy’s first Arabica harvest grown and picked entirely on Italian soil. The Morettino family estate has managed what would once have sounded like a marketing stunt, if it were not so plainly a sign of climate change doing what policy papers so often only promise: altering reality.

According to La Stampa, the plantation in the San Lorenzo ai Colli area, a few hundred metres above sea level, is currently producing around 100 kilograms of coffee cherries, which yield just over 15 kilograms of roasted beans. That is hardly a commercial breakthrough. But the scientific and symbolic value is obvious enough, and the University and the Botanical Garden of Palermo are involved in studying how tropical crops adapt to the new Mediterranean climate. One suspects the academics will have more to say about this than the accountants.

Coffee has long belonged to the tropics and equatorial belt, where heat, humidity and regular rainfall do the heavy lifting. The main producers are still concentrated in Latin America, Africa and Asia, with Arabica generally grown at higher altitudes than Robusta. Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Costa Rica dominate in Latin America; Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in Africa; Vietnam and Indonesia in Asia. Palermo is not joining that club anytime soon. But it has joined a smaller and stranger one: places where the climate has shifted enough to make coffee possible.

There have been earlier experiments in southern Europe. In Spain, trials in Granada have tested the plants’ resilience, while Gran Canaria has grown coffee since the 19th century thanks to its more southerly latitude and volcanic soils. In Portugal’s Azores, private plantations benefit from a mild climate. Before the Morettino harvest, a farm in Terrasini, also near Palermo, had already grown coffee entirely in greenhouses. The Sicilian case is different because it is open-air, and therefore more telling.

Italy’s appetite for coffee is hardly in doubt. It is the EU’s leading producer of roasted coffee, with more than 400 tonnes produced in 2025, even though it depends on imported green coffee for the raw material. The industry counts about a thousand roasters and generates annual turnover of 5.9 billion euros. Consumers, for their part, remain loyal in a way that borders on ritual. Surveys published on 1 October, International Coffee Day, show that Italians care deeply about quality, aroma and origin, and that three out of four drink coffee regularly. Among espresso drinkers, 83 per cent have it every day, at home or at the bar, with moka pots and capsule machines now running neck and neck.

There is, however, a catch the enthusiasts would rather not dwell on. Growing coffee outside its traditional zones may be made possible by warmer temperatures, but it also carries a cost in water and waste. Processing can require between 50 and 200 litres of water for every kilogram of green coffee, and the wastewater can damage local ecosystems if it is not treated properly. So the cheerful story of a new Mediterranean crop comes with the less cheerful arithmetic of climate stress. Coffee in Palermo may be a novelty today. It is also a reminder that adaptation is rarely free, and that the bill is usually sent somewhere else.

Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com