Coffee Time in Auka: A Story of Climate, Resilience, and the Real Meaning of Sustainability

At Elisabet’s Home in Auka

The aroma that fills Elisabet’s home in the village of Auka isn’t just the smell of coffee. It’s the scent of heritage and ritual. With practiced hands, she stirs the pale green beans in a pan over an open flame. The sound begins as a soft, rhythmic rustle, turning into a crackle as the beans expand in the heat. She stops the roast earlier than most commercial roasteries, resulting in a lighter profile that preserves the delicate notes of the bean’s origin.

Elisabet with family

These beans don’t come from the local store. Every time Elisabet visits her childhood home in Colón, she brings a new sack back to La Mosquitia. Her family grows the coffee themselves in the mountains, at elevations known for producing complex, lively flavors. They manage the entire process—from planting and harvesting to drying and grinding the beans. But as Elisabet knows all too well, the finest coffee almost always goes to export. Her ritual is therefore more than a personal preference; it’s a way to reclaim a share of the very best her country produces.

Elisabet first came to Puerto Lempira with her father, just for a visit. She hadn’t planned to stay, but during that time she met the man who is now her husband. They fell in love and kept in touch despite the distance. He suggested she move to Auka to live with him, saying they’d be by the beach, which sounded like a dream. One day after school, she decided to run away. She took a flight to Puerto Lempira, where he waited for her. From there, he brought her to Auka—but when she arrived, she realized they wouldn’t be living by the sea as she had thought. By then it was too late—she was already in love, and she chose to stay.

The family settled in, and today Elisabet’s husband follows in her father’s footsteps as a teacher at the local school. They are pillars in a community whose future is shaped by forces far beyond their control. Outside the comforting scent of freshly roasted coffee, another, harsher reality awaits.

A Changing Landscape

Just down the road in the village, we see that reality firsthand. Under the shade of a large tree, a group of children sit together. Balancing their notebooks on their knees, they listen to their teacher. This isn’t an idyllic outdoor lesson; it’s a makeshift solution. Their school, like so many other buildings, lies in ruins—a silent monument to the devastation left by Hurricanes Eta and Iota in November 2020.

Central America suffered a catastrophe of rare magnitude then: two Category 4 hurricanes struck the same area just two weeks apart, an event scientists say was intensified by warmer seas—a clear sign of a changing climate. For Honduras, the effects were devastating. The storms affected nearly four million people—over 40 percent of the population. In their wake, critical infrastructure like schools and roads was destroyed, and countless families lost their livelihoods. The fact that children in Auka are still having class outdoors speaks both to the depth of the crisis and the community’s struggle to recover.

What's left of the school in TIpi

From a Bean in Marcala to the Climate Crisis in Mosquitia

Back at Elisabet’s, the two coffees—her own light roast and the one we brought from Arvid Nordquist—become a tangible link between global sustainability strategies and the reality people in Auka live every day. The conversation quickly shifts from flavor notes to the topic that defines life here: the climate.

For the people of Auka, climate change isn’t a theoretical future problem. It’s a palpable reality they’ve watched escalate over the past decade. They talk about dry seasons growing longer and weather that has become erratic. Their observations are borne out by scientific data. In a country where agriculture is a lifeline for millions, these shifts are catastrophic.

Coffee—the country’s pride—is especially vulnerable. Rising temperatures create ideal conditions for coffee leaf rust (roya), an aggressive fungal disease that can wipe out entire plantations. Adaptation attempts, such as switching to supposedly resistant varieties, have often ended in disappointment. The threat goes far beyond coffee; staple crops like maize and beans are hit hard by drought and heat stress. In Honduras’ “Dry Corridor,” farmers have reported losses of over 80 percent of their harvests. Climate change deepens existing inequalities and forces people into an impossible choice: stay and risk hunger, or leave everything and migrate. The conversation in Auka is therefore not just about weather. It’s about survival.

A World Behind the Numbers

Despite the challenges in Auka, Elisabet prefers life here. She says she likes the climate much more than in her hometown—it’s cooler and more pleasant. But above all, she emphasizes freedom. In Colón, the area they lived in was very dangerous, and the family stayed locked in most of the time. In Auka, by contrast, her children can move freely, and they love swimming in the river. When they travel to Colón, the children want to stay no more than a week before politely asking to go back.

As our coffee time winds down, Elisabet sips the Swedish coffee, then her own. She nods appreciatively. The coffee from Sweden is good, she says, but not quite like hers. Her smile is warm and sincere. The aim was never to convince her of anything, but to meet and understand. Her judgment is a reminder that the deepest knowledge often resides with people who live in and from the landscape every day.

This personal encounter is the human reality behind the abstract terms in a company’s sustainability report. When a company talks about “long-term relationships” with growers or managing risks in its “value chain,” it is Elisabet’s reality they are talking about. Her resilience is the ultimate guarantor of that value chain’s survival. Investing in climate adaptation in regions like La Mosquitia is therefore not philanthropy; it’s a fundamental risk-management strategy.

For companies that want their climate work to be more than numbers in a spreadsheet, there is a whole world to get to know. It is a world of people like Elisabet, whose daily lives are a fight for resilience. The aftertaste of that coffee hour in Auka lingers. It is complex, much like Elisabet’s own coffee. It carries notes of a rich cultural heritage, a bitterness from the trials brought by storms and drought, but also a clear, bright note of hope and unyielding strength. That aftertaste is the true meaning of sustainability.