Matching risk to resilience capacity

Know your Resilience

Resilience is not a state of being, but rather a set of capacities that enables a system (such as a farm, farming family, or aggregator) to prevent or respond to threats to its health and stability (such as climate change).

Armed with climate risk data, companies still need to understand the resilience capacity of their supply chain by diagnosing suppliers’ ability to absorb weather shocks in the short-term and adapt to or transform with changing climatic conditions in the medium- to long-term.  Tools used to diagnose landscape, supply chain and farmer resilience can also be used to monitor progress made by implemented solutions.  For more information on tools, please see the “Know your Progress” section.

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.