Climate change adaptation, mitigation and livelihood benefits in coffee production: where are the synergies?

There are worldwide approximately 4.3 million coffee (Coffea arabica) producing smallholders generating a large share of tropical developing countries' gross domestic product, notably in Central America. Their livelihoods and coffee production are facing major challenges due to projected climate change, requiring adaptation decisions that may range from changes in management practices to changes in crops or migration. Since management practices such as shade use and reforestation influence both climate vulnerability and carbon stocks in coffee, there may be synergies between climate change adaptation and mitigation that could make it advantageous to jointly pursue both objectives. In some cases, carbon accounting for mitigation actions might even be used to incentivize and subsidize adaptation actions. To assess potential synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation in smallholder coffee production systems, we quantified (i) the potential of changes in coffee production and processing practices as well as other livelihood activities to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions, (ii) coffee farmers' climate change vulnerability and need for adaptation, including the possibility of carbon markets subsidizing adaptation. We worked with smallholder organic coffee farmers in Northern Nicaragua, using workshops, interviews, farm visits and the Cool Farm Tool software to calculate greenhouse gas balances of coffee farms. From the 12 activities found to be relevant for adaptation, two showed strong and five showed modest synergies with mitigation. Afforestation of degraded areas with coffee agroforestry systems and boundary tree plantings resulted in the highest synergies between adaptation and mitigation. Financing possibilities for joint adaptation-mitigation activities could arise through carbon offsetting, carbon insetting, and carbon footprint reductions. Non-monetary benefits such as technical assistance and capacity building could be effective in promoting such synergies at low transaction costs

Carbon footprints and carbon stocks reveal climate-friendly coffee production

International audienceCoffee production is impacting the climate by emitting greenhouse gasses. Coffee production is also vulnerable to climate change. As a consequence, the coffee sector is interested in climate-friendly forms of coffee production, but there is no consensus of what exactly this implies. Therefore, we studied two aspects of the climate impact of coffee production: the standing carbon stocks in the production systems and the product carbon footprint, which measures the greenhouse gas emissions per unit weight of coffee produced. We collected data from 116 coffee farms in five Latin American countries, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia, for four coffee production systems: (1) traditional polycultures, (2) commercial polycultures, (3) shaded monocultures, and (4) unshaded monocultures. We found that polycultures have a lower mean carbon footprint, of 6.2–7.3 kg CO2-equivalent kg−1 of parchment coffee, than monocultures, of 9.0–10.8 kg. We also found that traditional polycultures have much higher carbon stocks in the vegetation, of 42.5 Mg per ha, than unshaded monocultures, of 10.5 Mg. We designed a graphic system to classify production systems according to their climate friendliness. We identified several strategies to increase positive and reduce negative climate impacts of coffee production. Strategies include diversification of coffee farms with trees, the use of their wood to substitute for fossil fuel and energy-intensive building materials, the targeted use of fertilizer, and the use of dry or ecological processing methods for coffee instead of the traditional fully washed process

An agenda for assessing and improving conservation impacts of sustainability standards in tropical agriculture

Sustainability standards and certification serve to differentiate and provide market recognition to goods produced in accordance with social and environmental good practices, typically including practices to protect biodiversity. Such standards have seen rapid growth, including in tropical agricultural commodities such as cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soybeans, and tea. Given the role of sustainability standards in influencing land use in hotspots of biodiversity, deforestation, and agricultural intensification, much could be gained from efforts to evaluate and increase the conservation payoff of these schemes. To this end, we devised a systematic approach for monitoring and evaluating the conservation impacts of agricultural sustainability standards and for using the resulting evidence to improve the effectiveness of such standards over time. The approach is oriented around a set of hypotheses and corresponding research questions about how sustainability standards are predicted to deliver conservation benefits. These questions are addressed through data from multiple sources, including basic common information from certification audits; field monitoring of environmental outcomes at a sample of certified sites; and rigorous impact assessment research based on experimental or quasi‐experimental methods. Integration of these sources can generate time‐series data that are comparable across sites and regions and provide detailed portraits of the effects of sustainability standards. To implement this approach, we propose new collaborations between the conservation research community and the sustainability standards community to develop common indicators and monitoring protocols, foster data sharing and synthesis, and link research and practice more effectively. As the role of sustainability standards in tropical land‐use governance continues to evolve, robust evidence on the factors contributing to effectiveness can help to ensure that such standards are designed and implemented to maximize benefits for biodiversity conservation.Una Agenda para Evaluar y Mejorar los Impactos de Conservación de los Estándares de Sustentabilidad sobre la Agricultura TropicalResumenLos estándares de sustentabilidad y de certificación sirven para diferenciar y proporcionar reconocimiento de mercado a los bienes producidos de acuerdo con las buenas prácticas sociales y ambientales e incluyen típicamente a las prácticas para proteger a la biodiversidad. Dichos estándares han tenido un rápido crecimiento, incluso en comodidades de la agricultura tropical como el cacao, el café, la palma de aceite, la soya y el té. Dado el papel de los estándares de sustentabilidad en influenciar el uso de suelo en zonas críticas de biodiversidad, deforestación e intensificación agrícola, mucho podría ganarse de los esfuerzos para evaluar e incrementar la indemnización de conservación de estas estrategias. Para este fin, diseñamos una estrategia sistemática para monitorear y evaluar los impactos de conservación de los estándares de sustentabilidad agrícola y para usar la evidencia resultante para mejorar la efectividad de dichos estándares con el tiempo. La estrategia está orientada a partir de un juego de hipótesis y preguntas de investigación correspondientes sobre cómo los estándares de sustentabilidad están pronosticados para entregar beneficios de conservación. Estas preguntas se abordan a partir de datos de múltiples fuentes, incluyendo información común básica de auditorías de certificación; monitoreo en campo de resultados ambientales en una muestra de sitios certificados; e investigación de evaluaciones rigurosas de impacto con base en métodos experimentales o casi experimentales. La integración de estas fuentes puede generar datos de series de tiempo que son comparables a lo largo de sitios y regiones y proporcionan retratos detallados de los efectos de los estándares de sustentabilidad. Para implementar esta estrategia, proponemos colaboraciones nuevas entre la comunidad de investigadores de la conservación y la comunidad de estándares de sustentabilidad para desarrollar indicadores comunes y protocolos de monitoreo, fomentar la síntesis y el compartir los datos y enlazar con mayor efectividad la investigación y la práctica. Conforme el papel de los estándares de sustentabilidad en la gobernación del uso de suelo continúa con su evolución, la evidencia fuerte de los factores que contribuyen a la efectividad puede ayudar a asegurar que dichos estándares son diseñados e implementados para maximizar los beneficios para la conservación de la biodiversidad.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110892/1/cobi12411.pd