Identifying where risk sits in your supply chain

Know your Farmers

Once a company has pinpointed climate risk “hotspots” within sourcing regions, they can identify which suppliers are operating within those hotspots and how much supply comes from each of the climate risk zones (requiring incremental adaptation, systemic adaptation or transformational adaptation).  For a full explanation please see photo below.

The chart below shows a simplified version of how companies may begin to identify focus areas based on climate risk and volume of supply.  The selection of the focus area is an iterative process, requiring both climate data and knowledge of sourcing areas to identify priority populations.  Other variables may be included to fit companies’ strategic needs.

Country Specific Location Risk Zone Field Intelligence # Farmer Suppliers % of supply
Honduras Ocotopeque Systemic/Transformational Increased heat and decreased rainfall resulting in harder to manage pests and reduced yield 10.000 25%

Welcome to
Climate Smart Coffee

Increasingly, coffee companies recognize the need to plan for and act on climate change to mitigate supply, reputation and quality risk and realize their sustainability targets. This website is designed to guide medium and large companies, who buy from and support smallholder coffee value chains, to identify relevant areas of engagement and investment in smallholder adaptation to climate change.

Building on knowledge from platforms like coffee&climate, Global Coffee Platform, Specialty Coffee Association, and Conservation International’s Sustainable Coffee Challenge, climate smart coffee highlights research work completed by the USAID Feed the Future Alliance for Resilient Coffee, CCAFS Mainstreaming Climate Smart Value Chains initiative and other key partners.

For complementary information on climate-smart agriculture (CSA), please visit the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) CSA Guide which provides the basics of CSA across crops and geographies, and for companies working specifically with cocoa, please visit our sister site Climate Smart Cocoa, developed by CIAT and Rainforest Alliance/Utz.

Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security

Climate-Smart Agriculture Basics

Company Engagement in Climate-Smart Agriculture

Take Action

Increasingly, companies recognize the need to plan for climate change to mitigate risk and realize commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or other sustainability targets. Coffee companies in particular ultimately seek to translate climate risk intelligence into practical, operational strategies to build supply chain resilience. Diagnostic and decision-making tools are being created and accessible to users on this website as well as the toolbox.coffeeandclimate.org

Smallholder coffee sourcing entails working with many, diverse farming communities around the globe, each with its own agricultural practices, cultural context, and risk exposure. Depending on the role the coffee company plays in the supply chain, they may lack fine-grain visibility into smallholder performance, or they may seek guidance on how to translate fine-grain data on climate risk and smallholder performance into targeted action plans across their sourcing geographies.

To take action, coffee companies may follow a simple process laid out in the Introduction to Assessing Climate Resilience in Smallholder Supply Chains. This guide, created by the Sustainable Food Lab and Root Capital, breaks down the complex concept of resilience into manageable themes following a five-step process that coffee companies can follow (laid out below), including links to tools and resources offered by leaders in the field. The initiative for coffee & climate toolbox also contains actionable tools by a number of expert research organizations to address these steps.

Take Action

About

About

This website was developed by the Sustainable Food Lab and CIAT.  Thank you to the many organizations who provided tools and resources to the climate smart coffee website.  Photos for this website were provided by CIAT, the Sustainable Food Lab and World Coffee Research.

Our Research Partners

Led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) is a collaboration among all 15 CGIAR Research Centers, including IITA.  With help from the Rainforest Alliance, Root Capital and the Sustainable Food Lab, provide the evidence-based science behind climate smart coffee.  To learn more about individual contributes read below.