How IMPACT Is Building Industry Resilience

This Article At a Glance

IMPACT, Sucafina’s responsible sourcing program, is addressing some of the key drivers of climate change through 5 key pillars for improvement. This week, we’re doing a deep dive into 3 of these pillars – carbon emissions, deforestation and regenerative agriculture. We’ll be exploring why they matter and how IMPACT is supporting farmers who are working towards more environmentally sustainable farms.

• In some origins with poor yields,  carbon footprint can be reduced by improving productivity and crop management.
• In other regions, agroforestry – the intercropping of coffee with shade or fruit trees – is a practical option; while in others still, there might be the scope to optimize and reduce synthetic fertilizer usage.
• There is a lot of overlap between reducing carbon emissions, promoting regenerative agriculture and tackling deforestation.

How IMPACT Is Building Industry Resilience

Climate change is impacting farmers and consumers around the world. IMPACT, Sucafina's responsible sourcing program, is addressing some of the key drivers of climate change through 5 key pillars for improvement. This week, we’re doing a deep dive into 3 of these pillars – carbon emissions, deforestation and regenerative agriculture. We’ll be exploring why they matter and how IMPACT is supporting farmers who are working towards more environmentally sustainable farms.

Carbon Emissions

Although supply chains like ours emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, there are clear practices that farmers can introduce in their supply chain to help reduce those emissions. Agriculture can negatively contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also has the potential, through carbon sequestration, to be part of the solution. More on that later.

Since mid-2020 Sucafina has been working with Meo Carbon Solutions, an international consultant, to calculate carbon emissions from its global supply chains using a coffee-specific carbon calculator. The project started in Rwanda before gradually expanding to 10 Sucafina origins – Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, PNG, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi and Vietnam.

Some key takeaways we’ve seen so far:

• In some origins with poor yields, carbon footprint can be reduced by improving productivity and crop management.
• In other regions, agroforestry – the intercropping of coffee with shade or fruit trees – is a practical option; while in others still there might be the scope to optimize and reduce synthetic fertilizer usage.
• It’s also clear that wet processing – the practice of using water for pulping and fermentation – is a considerable emissions factor that needs to be optimized to reduce carbon emissions.
• There is a lot of overlap between reducing carbon emissions, promoting regenerative agriculture and tackling deforestation.

These insights have already allowed us to start implementing projects to reduce carbon emissions in some origins through carbon sequestration.

Carbon Sequestration Through Agroforestry​​

Farms can help sequester carbon by planting trees. Trees help sequester carbon through photosynthesis, where they convert carbon into oxygen and energy. Trees store carbon as tree tissue and draw down more carbon for as long as they grow.

Carbon sequestration through tree planting makes sense for Sucafina because it's part of our supply chain. Strong agroforestry programs can reduce coffee’s carbon footprint by sequestering carbon, improving farm resilience to climate change, increasing farmer livelihoods through additional crops and even establishing carbon credit programs that pay farmers for their ecosystem services. In 2022, two large projects were launched with support from a key roaster partner in Kenya and Rwanda. With these existing projects, we are aiming to plant over 600,000 trees in the next 5 years and sharing beneficial agroforestry practices with almost 40,000 farmers. New projects are coming online frequently with plans in Africa and Asia-Pacific already starting to take shape.

Deforestation

Forests cover about 30% of the planet and play an essential role in sustaining life on earth. Agriculture is currently the largest driver of deforestation as forested land is cleared to make way for new farming land. Cut trees both release their sequestered carbon into the atmosphere and are prevented from sequestering further carbon later on.

There is a new EU regulation, The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), that mandates that all coffee imported in the EU will be grown on land where deforestation has not taken place after 2020. In practice, this means that all coffee going to the EU must be traceable to an individual plot/farm that can be tracked via satellite imagery to ensure no deforestation is occurring.

IMPACT-verified coffee will be EUDR compliant. To attain "responsibly sourced" verification with IMPACT, farms will have to be geolocated (either through GPS point or polygon mapping)  to track forest cover (mapping will be phased in over 3 years) and farmers and cooperatives will work hand-in-hand with implementers to ensure that deforestation is not occurring as a result of coffee production.  When deforestation is observed in a coffee supply chain, Sucafina origin offices will work together with farmers to identify the key drivers of deforestation, address farmer needs and begin to reforest land.

Regenerative Agriculture

The third pillar of IMPACT looks at implementing a system of farming that can address both carbon emissions and deforestation: regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is a series of practices in farming that are developed around techniques that improve soil health and carbon capture while producing a variety of cash and food crops for farming families.

The approach is based on 6 principles:​

• Keep the soil covered​
• Maintain living roots​
• Minimize soil disturbance​
• Increase plant diversity​
• Integrate livestock (if present) ​
• Optimize and reduce the use of synthetic fertilizers & pesticides​

Regenerative farming means rethinking the entire farm operation, growing functional biodiversity by looking at the farm as a landscape and building in elements to promote healthy ecosystems. ​ It focuses on enhancing and restoring the health of the entire ecosystem, including soil health, biodiversity, and water cycles, often incorporating holistic practices such as crop rotation, cover cropping and no-till farming. Organic agriculture, while also avoiding synthetic chemicals and GMOs, primarily emphasizes the use of natural inputs and certified organic practices without necessarily aiming for the broader ecological impacts targeted by regenerative agriculture.

Beyond lowering the carbon emissions of farming, regenerative agriculture can help capture a lot of carbon being emitted from other industries. Practices like crop rotation and new technologies like soil moisture sensors and weather monitoring can improve soil health, increase total yields and reduce carbon emissions. Furthermore, regenerative agriculture can combat the threats monocultures often face, including susceptibility to disease and soil nutrient depletion.

Farmers who are IMPACT verified are encouraged and supported as they implement more agroforestry and regenerative agriculture techniques on their farms. Many Sucafina offices offer affordable native tree seedlings, training in intercropping and agronomic advice to farmers interested in increasing the sustainability of their farms. They also operate demonstration gardens that illustrate how productive and sustainable regenerative agriculture can be. 

IMPACT’s pillars of carbon emissions, deforestation and regenerative agriculture are paving the way for a more sustainable future for farmers and consumers alike. Interested in investing in a better future? IMPACT-verified coffees are currently available from 10 origins with more coming online soon. Get in touch with your trader for more information.

Stay tuned for an upcoming article about IMPACT’s other 2 pillars: living income and human rights.