Saudi Coffee Company Introduces JAZEAN

The Saudi Coffee Company, a Public Investment Fund fully owned company, has announced the launch of JAZEAN
The Saudi Coffee Company, a Public Investment Fund fully owned company, has announced the launch of JAZEAN
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Saudi Coffee Company Introduces JAZEAN

The Saudi Coffee Company, a Public Investment Fund fully owned company, has announced the launch of JAZEAN
The Saudi Coffee Company, a Public Investment Fund fully owned company, has announced the launch of JAZEAN

The Saudi Coffee Company, a Public Investment Fund fully owned company, has announced the launch of its coffee brand, JAZEAN.

Sourced from the south of Saudi Arabia, which is located in the verdant coffee belt and the best arabica beans selection from around the world, JAZEAN is a high-quality specialty coffee made sustainably from premium Coffea Arabica to deliver a blend that is uniquely Saudi to the world.

“JAZEAN is a labor of love. Love for our nation, for our culture, and especially our farmers who have sustained our coffee belts through generations,” said Marketing Director at Saudi Coffee Company Mohammed Zainy.

“It is a symbol of our aspiration to develop a coffee industry that is rooted in sustainable production, from cultivation through to packaging. By developing JAZEAN, we are putting our local farmers on the map and giving them a platform to contribute to a national brand, which will take our homegrown product global.”

JAZEAN coffee is a unique blend of locally and globally produced Arabica beans. It is the product of one of the oldest coffee-growing communities in the world with over 800 years of coffee cultivation, based in Saudi Arabia’s southern region coffee belt, which is characterized by fertile lands, groundwater, wells, and valleys.

JAZEAN’s flavor profile will be deeply representative of the land, climate, and farming practices of the region, the company said in a press release. It will spotlight the Coffea Arabica beans, which have been cultivated and elevated by successive generations of coffee farmers.

In addition to contributing to the economy diversification efforts through the launch of JAZEAN, the Saudi Coffee Company is investing in the south region coffee community by introducing and training farmers on global best practices, helping farmers select better quality seeds, refine their farming methods, manage their resources more efficiently, and pilot new techniques to increase quality yield, it said.

JAZEAN will offer coffee products varying between specialty coffee, Saudi coffee, and others. It will do so through collaborations with the entities already operating, such as café, roasteries, and the HORECA sector, in Saudi Arabia to transform homegrown Saudi coffee from a local favorite to a global phenomenon.



In a Hotter Future, What Comes After Coral Reefs Die? 

This underwater photo taken on April 5, 2024, shows bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, located 270 kilometers (167 miles) north of the city of Cairns. (AFP)
This underwater photo taken on April 5, 2024, shows bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, located 270 kilometers (167 miles) north of the city of Cairns. (AFP)
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In a Hotter Future, What Comes After Coral Reefs Die? 

This underwater photo taken on April 5, 2024, shows bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, located 270 kilometers (167 miles) north of the city of Cairns. (AFP)
This underwater photo taken on April 5, 2024, shows bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, located 270 kilometers (167 miles) north of the city of Cairns. (AFP)

The fate of coral reefs has been written with a degree of certainty rare in climate science: at 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, most are expected to die.

This is not a far-off scenario. Scientists predict that the rise of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) will be reached within a decade and that beyond that point, many coral simply cannot survive.

It is important to accept this and ask what next "rather than trying to hold onto the past," said David Obura, chair of IPBES, the UN's expert scientific panel on biodiversity.

"I wish it were different," Obura, a Kenyan reef scientist and founding director of CORDIO East Africa, a marine research organization, told AFP.

"We need to be pragmatic about it and ask those questions, and face up to what the likely future will be."

And yet, it is a subject few marine scientists care to dwell on.

"We are having a hard time imagining that all coral reefs really could die off," said Melanie McField, a Caribbean reef expert, who described a "sort of pre-traumatic stress syndrome" among her colleagues.

"But it is likely in the two-degree world we are rapidly accelerating to," McField, founding director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative, told AFP.

When stressed in hotter ocean waters, corals expel the microscopic algae that provides their characteristic color and food source. Without respite, bleached corals slowly starve.

At 1.5C of warming relative to pre-industrial times, between 70 and 90 percent of coral reefs are expected to perish, according to the IPCC, the global authority on climate science.

At 2C, that number rises to 99 percent.

Even with warming as it stands today -- about 1.4C -- mass coral death is occurring, and many scientists believe the global collapse of tropical reefs may already be underway.

- What comes next -

Obura said it was not pessimistic to imagine a world without coral reefs, but an urgent question that scientists were "only just starting to grapple with".

"I see no reason to not be clear about where we are at this point in time," Obura said. "Let's be honest about that, and deal with the consequences."

Rather than disappear completely, coral reefs as they exist today will likely evolve into something very different, marine scientists on four continents told AFP.

This would happen as slow-growing hard corals -- the primary reef builders that underpin the ecosystem -- die off, leaving behind white skeletons without living tissue.

Gradually, these would be covered by algae and colonized by simpler organisms better able to withstand hotter oceans, like sponges, mussels, and weedy soft corals like sea fans.

"There will be less winners than there are losers," said Tom Dallison, a marine scientist and strategic advisor to the International Coral Reef Initiative.

These species would dominate this new underwater world. The dead coral beneath -- weakened by ocean acidification, and buffeted by waves and storms -- would erode over time into rubble.

"They will still exist, but they will just look very different. It is our responsibility to ensure the services they provide, and those that depend on them, are protected," Dallison said.

- Dark horizon -

One quarter of all ocean species live among the world's corals.

Smaller, sparser, less biodiverse reefs simply means fewer fish and other marine life.

The collapse of reefs threatens in particular the estimated one billion people who rely on them for food, tourism income, and protection from coastal erosion and storms.

But if protected and managed properly, these post-coral reefs could still be healthy, productive, attractive ecosystems that provide some economic benefit, said Obura.

So far, the picture is fuzzy -- research into this future has been very limited.

Stretched resources have been prioritized for protecting coral and exploring novel ways to make reefs more climate resilient.

But climate change is not the only thing threatening corals.

Tackling pollution, harmful subsidies, overfishing and other drivers of coral demise would give "the remaining places the best possible chance of making it through whatever eventual warming we have," Obura said.

Conservation and restoration efforts were "absolutely essential" but alone were like "pushing a really heavy ball up a hill, and that hill is getting steeper," he added.

Trying to save coral reefs "is going to be extremely difficult" as long as we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere, said Jean-Pierre Gattuso, an oceans expert from France's flagship scientific research institute, CNRS.

But some coral had developed a level of thermal tolerance, he said, and research into restoring small reef areas with these resilient strains held promise.

"How do we work in this space when you have this sort of big dark event on the horizon? It's to make that dark event a little brighter," said Dallison.