DoreenMolly/kenya-coffee-research

# Climate Drivers of Kenyan Coffee Yield **A data science investigation using 35 years of climate and agricultural data.** > How much does climate explain Kenya's 23% decline in coffee yield since 1990? **Short answer: It explains about half.** **→ Live site · Notebooks · Figures** --- ## Project Overview Built an end-to-end data science pipeline analyzing 35 years of Kenyan coffee production and NASA climate data to quantify how much climate explains declining coffee yields. This project draws on thirty-five years of merged climate and agricultural data, spanning 1990 to 2024, across eight of Kenya's major coffee-growing regions, which together account for approximately ninety-five percent of national production. Climate variables were aggregated using production-weighted regional averages, ensuring that higher-producing regions are represented proportionally in the resulting national figures. The analysis proceeds through a progression of five regression models, each tested against a full battery of diagnostic assumptions, and further validated through leave-one-out and lag-sensitivity robustness checks. The complete pipeline, from raw data through final results, is documented in fully reproducible notebooks. --- ## Key Findings | Finding | Result | |---|---| | Yield decline (1990–2024) | **↓ 23%** | | Strongest climate predictor | **Temperature** (hotter years → lower yield) | | Rainfall's effect on yield | **Not statistically significant** — in any model tested | | Best model performance | **51% of yield variance explained** | --- ## Why This Project Growing up in Kenya with family ties to smallholder coffee farming, I had heard climate change cited for years as the main reason behind the country's declining coffee yields. I wanted to know how much of that story actually holds up against the data, and to open up the possibility that other factors are at play as well. ## Data Pipeline ``` FAOSTAT (yield, production, export value) │ ▼ Data Clean …