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Climate change brews trouble for tea industry, but circular solutions await

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It’s estimated that we drink around 5 billion cups of tea every day. Producing this vast quantity of leaves to quench global thirst for black, green and other varieties is an industry that spans more than 60 tropical and subtropical countries and largely depends on smallholder farmers. Globally, agriculture plays a large part in driving our planet’s “triple crisis”: climate change, biodiversity destruction and releasing chemical pollution into oceans and waterways. Like many other agricultural crops, tea has an impact, implicated in deforestation of tropical areas (both historic and present), and heavy use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that harm soils and rivers and add to climate change. On top of these environmental issues, farmers and tea workers face deeply embedded human rights and gender issues, such as low wages and poor working conditions, exacerbated by globally low prices, according to experts. Sabita Banerji, founder and CEO of The International Roundtable for Sustainable Tea (THIRST), says the tea sector is in many ways akin to “a 19th-century industry that’s now struggling to survive in the 21st century,” as it faces a host of sustainability challenges, both social and environmental. “It needs to grow and adapt to the current times,” she adds. While the tea industry is contending with its environmental and social problems, human activities driving climate change threaten to hammer tea-producing countries and farmers who depend on the crop for their livelihoods. “The tea sector faces daunting economic challenges stemming from climate impacts, low tea prices, rising production costs,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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