PCLM-D-22-00112

Synchronous climate hazards pose an increasing challenge to global coffee production

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Richardson,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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Liqiang Xu

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Under a warming climate, agricultural responses to a changing climate are crucial for human society. The manuscript entitled “Synchronous climate hazards pose an increasing challenge to global coffee production” by Richardson et al. examined a 41-year history of climate hazards including high Vapour Pressure Deficit, high/low daily maximum temperature, etc. By analyzing the correlation between global coffee production and climate variables, the authors identified that ENSO could be an important predictor of hazards in some regions, including the tropical South America, Indonesia and Vietnam. MJO may also be partly responsible for crop (coffee) failure.

The research provides new insight into global impacts on agriculture and ecosystems. Topic of this study well falls within the scope of PLOS Climate. The manuscript is well designed and structured. The logic is reasonable and sufficient, and the conclusions are convincing. The writing is good enough. And the findings of this work add to our knowledge of agricultural resilience to climate change. I suggest publication of this work after a minor revision.

Some other comments:

Title page: No matter whether the corresponding author finds a new position, an email address is required for submission.

Line 117: The authors used a 0.083°*0.083° spatial resolution. Such resolution looks weird. Can the authors explain a little bit more on this?

Line 131: For temporal shift examination, the authors cited their work published earlier in this year (reference No. 24). This is all right, but a brief description of the methods could be better, especially for readers who are not very familiar with this.

Lines 281-282: The first sentence of this paragraph (Fig. 5 suggests ......) looks like a new finding of this work. However, we can not simply get this conclusion only by Fig. 5, as ENSO was not given in this figure. This conclusion mark could be provided after some analysis, rather than at the beginning of this paragraph.

Caption of Fig 7: Specify the meaning of MJO1-MJO8 (Fig. b) in the figure caption. PLOS Climate has a very wide readership, such explanation could be helpful for non-climate scientists.

Reviewer #2: In this manuscript the authors analyze how synchronous hazards to coffee production have evolved from 1980-2020 and what is driving them. It is a well-written manuscript with well-presented figures and was generally a pleasure to read. I thank the authors for the time and effort they have clearly put into the manuscript.

I have two related questions about the definition of extremes used in their analysis, although only the first would change the downstream results, and even so changes will likely be minor. Despite my long-winded questions, I believe the authors’ analyses are fundamentally sound, and their conclusions are interesting and justified by the results presented.

My question is about the region-level trigger. Why is one standard deviation of an area surpassing a threshold appropriate as compared to an absolute value (e.g. 10%, 25% or 50% etc. of an area)? Perhaps present a table of what percent of the total regional area this one-standard deviation threshold translates into for each region to justify that it does not set the amount of area needed to trigger a threshold at unreasonably low levels (e.g. in areas that rarely experience extremes, does this set the threshold to be only a handful of pixels?)

The present definition has two potential problems

1. areas that almost never experience a hazard are categorized as experiencing it at the regional level in a number of years. For example, based on Figure 2 excess precip hazards are virtually absent from Northern Brazil. But based on Figure 4, there are 4 years where a large enough proportion of the area is covered by excess precip that it is concerning on a regional level. How should a reader interpret this result?

More importantly, I would have the same question about growing season temperatures less than 18 or 22C in Mexico and Colombia and (to a lesser extent) Indonesia. Based on Figure 2, in these areas there are some pixels that are always below the threshold and some pixels that are never below the threshold. It’s unclear to me how these results from Figure 2 translates into the time series of threats of the growing season temperature below 18 or 22C for Colombia and Mexico in Figure 4

2. A related question about temperature-threshold definitions for maximum temperatures. If a temperature of an average daily max temperature of 29.5C or minimum temperature greater than 18.6C is deemed detrimental based on past literature, and there are regions that exceed this threshold every year (N. Brazil, India, Indonesia, etc), what is the justification for defining your regional-scale metrics based on standard deviations, which makes these regions look as if they don’t experience any damaging temperatures at all? It seems to me that the authors should either reverse this to indicate that these regions where their metric becomes ill-defined are regions that experience damaging temperatures in every year or they should change their threshold to be more appropriate for each location. Presumably these are the regions most in danger of temperature-based damage but because the authors set their threshold at a lower “sub-optimal” rather than a higher (e.g. “very damaging”) threshold then used a standard deviation, it looks like these areas are not at risk at all on a regional scale (figs 3 and 4). This too-low threshold conflates an ill defined threshold with a lack of signal. It also distorts Figures 3-4, although changing from a uniformly absent hazard to a uniformly present hazard will not substantively change the rest of the results.

The authors defend their approach in lines 209-212 by invoking irrigation and shading as management practices, but it seems unlikely that shading protects a coffee crop against any potential maximum temperature it may experience. To use this argument, they need defend/cite the idea that the crops in Nicaragua, Vietnam, Northern Brazil, and India have never experienced daily maximum temperatures that are damaging to the coffee crop

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Synchronous climate hazards pose an increasing challenge to global coffee production

PCLM-D-22-00112R1

Dear Dr Richardson,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Synchronous climate hazards pose an increasing challenge to global coffee production' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Liqiang Xu

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have adequately addressed all my comments raised earlier.

Reviewer #2: The authors have addressed all of my comments with the sensitivity analyses they conducted and have made them available to interested readers in the supplementary information. Thank you.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Weston Anderson

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