Scaling climate smart coffee and cocoa

Key lessons from using Certification as scaling mechanism for CSA under the CCAFS funded Climate Smart Coffee and Cocoa Value Chain Project (CSVC) Outcome 1: Influence on new Rainforest Alliance (RA) standard development Outcome 2: UTZ/RA SP application and scaling Outcome 4: Landscape wor

Summary: Climate-Smart Agriculture in the 2017 SAN Sustainable Agriculture Standard

Climate change fundamentally and increasingly affects agriculture. Warming, drought and extreme weather are already altering yields and quality of crops produced around the world. They also stand to impact water availability, nutritional value of foods, and food security and as such the livelihoods of natural resource dependent communities as a whole. The economic effects are already being felt by farmers and across global supply chains. Agricultural businesses identify climate change as a serious long-term risk in supply management. At the same time, agricultural land use systems all contribute to greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions. Chemical fertilizers, manure and methane from livestock, wastewater and deforestation (converting forests to croplands or grazing lands) are all major emitters of GHGs. Globally, direct agricultural practices generate 10-12% of GHGs. Add to that deforestation, and agriculture accounts for 25% of global GHG emissions. But agriculture and cattle production can also be a force for greater adaptation and resilience in the face of climate change. Under the right conditions, agriculture provides a multitude of environmental services, such as carbon sequestration, watershed protection and biodiversity conservation, all of which contribute to climate resilience. Certain sustainable practices help farmers under pressure from climate change to adapt and keep producing and improving without resorting to harmful techniques, and help companies manage and reduce climate risks in their supply chains. “Climate-smart agriculture” is an approach to reorienting agricultural and cattle production to the new realities of climate change. It creates the technical, policy and investment conditions for achieving sustainable agricultural development and food security as climate change unfolds. It is composed of three main pillars: •sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes; •adapting and building resilience to climate change; and •reducing and/or removing GHG emissions where possible

Sustainable Tourism at the Rainforest Alliance: Global Partnerships Benefit Economies and Ecosystems in Latin America

Culture & Arts, Rainforest Alliance, Economies and Ecosystems in Latin America

Sustainable Tourism Stewardship Council - raising the standards and benefits of sustainable tourism and ecotourism certification

Certification of sustainable tourism and ecotourism can help to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts of tourism, ensure that the tourism industry is held accountable and provide marketing benefits to those firms that meet the certification standards. Reports by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Tourism Organization (WTO) have cited the benefits of certification and many governments, NGOs and other stakeholders are introducing national, regional and international certification programs. There is consensus that the increasing numbers of certification programs would benefit from shared functions such as marketing, training and development, while supply chains and consumers would benefit from the setting of standards. Some two years ago, the Rainforest Alliance, with funding from the Ford Foundation and help from its Advisory Committees of NGOs, multilateral agencies and industry representatives, initiated a study of the feasibility of establishing an international Sustainable Tourism Stewardship Council (STSC) to promote globally recognized, high-quality certification programs for sustainable tourism and ecotourism through a process of information sharing, marketing, and assessment of standards. (Certification is defined as the procedure by which the certification/awarding body gives written assurance and awards a logo (to the consumer and the industry in general) to signify that a product, process, service, or management system conforms to specified requirements. Accreditation is key to the role of a Stewardship Council, a body that grants certifying powers. In effect it certifies that the certifiers are doing their job correctly.) This report summarizes the findings over the two years of the study. During the study period, the authors documented growing international agreement about the need for a sound accreditation program to assess and help standardize the rapidly growing number of certification programs for the sustainable and ecotourism markets. The study involved a broad range of experts around the globe from grassroots and indigenous community activists to key tourism firms to high-level officials in UN and international environmental organizations. The need for a STSC was publicly endorsed at the World Ecotourism Summit (WES) and incorporated in its final communiqué. The Rainforest Alliance (and this project's Advisory Committees) acknowledges that certification and accreditation are not a panacea for all the problems associated with unsustainable tourism. Certification is one important tool currently being used and its merits and weaknesses must be recognized. However the study and the report presented hereby are intended to address specifically the feasibility of implementing a Stewardship Council as an accreditation organization for sustainable tourism and ecotourism certification. This report analyzes the state of the art in tourism certification and the lessons to be learned from accreditation in other sectors. Based on extensive consultation, it profiles key stakeholders and considers needs that the STSC can satisfy, and methods to do so. It proposes an organizational blueprint for a STSC that grows through a phased implementation to allow for bottom-up development of agendas and structures. It benchmarks the criteria used in certification at present to consider the feasibility of an international standard, and it also benchmarks principles and guidelines for managing tourism certification that can form the basis of accreditation criteria. As a result of the extensive consultation process, we propose three phases of development aimed at improving the quality of certification programs (and thus the sustainability of tourism) and address different issues affecting tourism certification. • Phase 1: STSC-Network to share information and gain consensus on priorities and processes. It is recommended that the STSC starts as a Network for a period of two years within which a wide range of stakeholders can consider the results of this feasibility study and the applicability in different regions, discuss the contents of a possible international standard and the necessary regional variations. The Network phase also gives tourism certification programs a vehicle to build trust and to take ownership of the systems proposed. • Phase 2: STSC-Association to market certified products, provide guidance to countries seeking to establish or upgrade certification programs, and reach agreement on standards and processes. The STSC-Association phase allows tourism certification programs and other stakeholders to agree on international standards and criteria and methods to assess how programs meet these standards, while benefiting from joint marketing and training that increases the exposure of the tourism certification programs and improves their performance. The Association phase is a necessary stepping-stone to allow tourism certification programs to make the necessary improvements to be able to meet accreditation requirements. • Phase 3: STSC-Accreditation to accredit and market certification programs that meet the agreed upon standards and demonstrate capacity to certify. This phase finally includes all key functions of the STSC by building on the agreements made at the Association phase and introducing the key element of accreditation. Structures from the Association are kept and the function of accreditation is outsourced to be able to maintain training and marketing functions separate from decision-making on which certification programs are accredited, and in doing so, guarantee independence and transparency and avoid conflicts of interest

Improving Cocoa sector Climate-Smart Awareness and decision-making

The cocoa sector recognizes climate change and weather volatility as direct threats to their businesses, and some are acting to incorporate climate smart practices into their programs in West Africa. This case study shares cocoa companies’ perceptions regarding the usefulness of the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS)-led Consortium’s research and onvening on climate smart cocoa (CSC) in Ghana, also in connection to the USAID Feed the Future Climate Smart Cocoa Program, led by the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF). While a large cross section of the industry has attended the CCAFS and CSC meetings and had access to the materials, this document focuses on four of the companies engaged. Included are company-specific case studies which describe how Touton, Ecom, The Hershey Company (Hershey), and Olam have leveraged the decision-support tools produced by CCAFS, namely climate suitability maps, the science underpinning the Climate Smart Cocoa Manual with recommendations by impact zone, and various climate-smart agriculture (CSA) Apps. We share also companies’ constructive feedback on remaining gaps and opportunities, and conclude with potential future directions for CCAFS and USAID for effective partnership with industry. The case was developed by the Sustainable Food Lab, in collaboration with IITA, in July-September 2018 and draws from extended qualitative interviews with four cocoa companies and several project participants

Environmental-economic benefits and trade-offs on sustainably certified coffee farms

Coffee with diverse shade trees is recognized as conserving greater biodiversity than more intensive production methods. Sustainable certification has been proposed as an incentive to conserve shade grown coffee. With 40% of global coffee production certified as sustainable, evidence is needed to demonstrate whether certification supports the environmental benefits of shade coffee. Environmen-tal and economic data were taken from 278 coffee farms in Nicaragua divided between non-certified and five different sustainable certifications. Farms were propensity-score matched by altitude, area of coffee and farmer education to ensure comparability between non-certified and certified farms. Farms under all certifications had better environmental characteristics than non-certified for some indica-tors, but none were better for all indicators. Certified farms generally received better prices than non-certified farms. Farms with different certifications had different investment strategies; C.A.F.E. Prac-tice farms had high investment and high return strategies, while Utz and Organic farms had low in-vestment, low productivity strategies. Tree diversity was inversely related to productivity, price and net revenue in general, but not for certified farms that received higher prices. Certification differenti-ates farms with better environmental characteristics and management, provides some economic bene-fits to most farmers, and may contribute to mitigating environment/economic trade-offs

Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Agriculture Standard: Applicable for Smallholders Farms

In January 2018, the Rainforest Alliance merged with UTZ. We joined forces because we know that together we can have a greater impact and be a better partner to the many stakeholders we work with. With this new sustainable agriculture standard, we intend to harmonize the existing standards of the Rainforest Alliance and UTZ, learn from past experiences, but most importantly bring innovation and new insight into certification and agricultural sustainability. Our new sustainable agriculture standard is designed to maximize positive social, environmental, and economic impact, while offering farmers an enhanced framework to improve their livelihoods and protecting the landscapes where they live and work. For this first draft of the standard, a full public consultation is organized from December 2018 to February 2019 to gather feedback and improve this document. This sustainable agriculture standard forms the heart of the Rainforest Alliance’s new certification strategy. In addition to the content of the standard, a larger system of assurance, chain of custody, and monitoring and evaluation will support its implementation. Finally, at the widest level, advocacy and landscape-level interventions support the transformation of sustainable supply chains

Buenas prácticas para un turismo sostenible

Presentación sobre el cluster de turismo sostenible. Da a conocer el concepto de buenas prácticas, implementación de buenas prácticas y por último, una guía para estructurar un plan de buenas prácticas

Extension materials for CSA practices in cocoa for West Africa

Extension materials for CSA practices in cocoa for West Afric