[3][4] Coffea arabica was first described scientifically by Antoine de Jussieu, who named it Jasminum arabicum after studying a specimen from the Botanic Gardens of Amsterdam.

This hybridization event at the origin of Coffea arabica is estimated between 1.08 million and 543,000 years ago and is linked to changing environmental conditions in East Africa.

[11][12] The species is widely naturalised in areas outside its native land, in many parts of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, China, and assorted islands in the Caribbean and in the Pacific.

[15] In the Udawattakele and Gannoruwa Forest Reserves near Kandy, Sri Lanka, coffee shrubs are also a problematic invasive species.

[17] The Wet Tropics Management Authority has classified Coffea arabica as an environmental weed for southeast Queensland due to its invasiveness in non-agricultural areas.

The Arab innovation in Yemen of making a brew from roasted beans spread first among the Egyptians and Turks, and later on found its way around the world.

This makes them ideal for blending with the higher acidity coffees from Central America and East Africa.

[25] It is expected that a medium-term depletion of indigenous populations of C. arabica may occur, due to projected global warming, based on IPCC modelling.

[26] Climate change—rising temperatures, longer droughts, and excessive rainfall—appears to threaten the sustainability of arabica coffee production, leading to attempts to breed new cultivars for the changing conditions.

In some case, the coffee is still advertised as "100% Arabica" in flyers in 2024, but is no longer declared so on the actual package.

One strain of Coffea arabica (called AC1, AC2 and AC3 in honour of the geneticist Alcides Carvalho) naturally contains very little caffeine.

[31] Although it has a huge wild population of 13.5 to 19.5 billion individuals throughout its native range, C. arabica is still considered endangered on the IUCN Red List due to numerous threats it faces.

In addition, climate change may have a major effect on growing areas for wild C. arabica in Ethiopia due to its high-temperature sensitivity, and estimates indicate that population could reduce by 50–80% with a 40–50% reduction in area of occupancy by 2088; climate change can also impact reproductive success.

The more heat-tolerant Coffea stenophylla may replace C. arabica as the dominant coffee species in cultivation in order to guard against this.