Abstract
Coffee 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.
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Notes
Only fuel wood replacing fossil fuel outside the coffee system (that is, not including coffee drying for example) would qualify for inclusion in the product carbon footprint to avoid double counting.
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Acknowledgments
This study was conducted under the CGIAR research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). The fieldwork was carried out as a part of the Coffee Under Pressure (CUP) project funded by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. We thank the coffee farmers and the staff from the organizations Apecafé, Acoderol, Prodecoop, Pronatura Sur, ECOM, and Neumann for their collaboration in the field data collection, as well as Jonathan Hillier, Jos van Hal, Stephanie Daniels, Diana Sophia Blackburn Cuero, and Katharina Plassmann for their advice during this study.
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van Rikxoort, H., Schroth, G., Läderach, P. et al. Carbon footprints and carbon stocks reveal climate-friendly coffee production. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 34, 887–897 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-014-0223-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-014-0223-8