Japanese Tea

Japanese Tea is a 1.3 billion dollar market and only three percent of its tea leaves the country. The rest of the tea is consumed everyday by its people, whether casually or apart from the Japanese tea ceremony it is a beloved drink in Japan.

However, Japan's tea industry has gone through some rough times after an earthquake on march 11, 2011 that lead to nuclear radiation tainting many tea leaves. The industry has made a come back from this devastating disaster. But Japan's newest problem is with climate change, the country has undergone a rise in temperature. Figures from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) show that annual average air temperatures nationwide rose by a rate equivalent to 1.15°C per century between 1898 and 2010. This is considerably higher than the global average temperature rise of 0.74°C over the last century (according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers”).

Japan has one of the fastest rising temperatures in the world and it has been causing plants to flower earlier each spring and, counter intuitively, insects are appearing later. Perhaps because their pupal stages need a certain period of chilling in order to develop, so with winters getting warmer they take longer to develop. In addition, species’ ranges the physical areas they inhabit are expanding northward by between 18 km and 140 km per decade.