Healthy & Thriving Environment
A truly healthy and thriving coffee sector is one where dynamic agroforestry—rich with native shade trees, diverse intercrops and restored forest patches—drives biodiversity recovery, doubles carbon storage, cools farms during heatwaves, strengthens soils and water cycles, and supports local microclimates.
This nature-first approach can be enabled by transparent, accountable supply chains and targeted public and private support so farmers can adopt climate-positive practices with limited financial risk, diversify food and income for resilience, and receive living incomes and wages that make conservation economically viable. Together, these shifts transform coffee-growing regions into resilient, productive ecosystems that sustain species, sequester carbon, secure water and food, and uplift rural communities while ensuring long-term supply and diversity of coffee production.
Agroforestry systems can bring a wide range of ecological benefits. Integrating shade trees and diverse crops can protect up to 19 times more biodiversity and store twice as much carbon as monocultures, or more. Trees in and around coffee help preserve and strengthen soil moisture and fertility during droughts, cool coffee during heatwaves, contribute to pest control, and promote microclimatic control such as stimulating rainfall. At the same time, agroforestry can enhance food security by encouraging production diversification for foods and/or other cash crops, making farmers less vulnerable to the price volatility of a single commodity.
Many stakeholders are taking some small steps to help this transition. Examples exist in Vietnam, Brazil, Uganda and Indonesia of the development of national-level agronomy curricula that encourages producers to increase on-farm biodiversity and integrate shade trees where monoculture was once dominant . At small project-level, some coffee industry actors are training farmers to intercrop and improve their household nutrition and/or diversify the products they sell for income. Several coffee companies are also enabling locally managed nurseries for improved coffee seedlings and grafting materials alongside the distribution of other crops for diverse farm systems. The financial sector has begun to offer long-term financial products to enable production transformation in the form of carbon credits and other long-term ‘innovative finance’ structures.
In short, restoring ecological balance through agroforestry is essential to securing coffee’s future, and many necessary solutions already exist, albeit in siloes and islands of excellence.
BITTER NOTES
Until the 1970s, most coffee was produced in agroforestry systems, but pressure to increase production drove widespread loss to tree cover and biodiversity. By 2010, monoculture and limited shade became dominant, responsible for roughly three quarters of coffee production. Agroforestry is coffee’s buffer against climate change, and the deterioration of forests has adverse climate impacts, which in turn impact coffee. By 2050, it is predicted that roughly half of the land currently suitable for growing Arabica coffee is projected to disappear due to rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and deforestation.
Deforestation
Coffee production is the sixth largest driver of deforestation in the world. Given climate change’s impacts on coffee, the risk of further deforestation is high due to the possible future need to transition coffee production to higher, cooler elevations, which are often forested areas.
Deforestation for coffee has a range of negative impacts. The most obvious of these is the loss of biodiversity and habitat, with extinction or extirpation of many forms of flora and fauna as a direct result. Forests have a tremendous climatological contribution; acting as massive carbon absorption and storage systems, forests play a key role in mitigating climate change. The loss of forests also means a loss of natural resources for communities and lost livelihoods and safe living conditions for people. At the local level in terms of producer and community wellbeing, forests contribute to soil and water quality and flood prevention. Deforestation disturbs local, regional, and global water cycles, and this can result in less clouds, lower humidity, and modified, erratic patterns of rainfall, and also droughts. It also eliminates livelihoods for people who depend on forest resources for their food, fuel, medicine and building materials.
Climate change
Climate change combined with deforestation impacts coffee significantly. Changing weather patterns due to global climate change and local deforestation are a daily reality in many coffee producing regions. Its impact can differ wildly depending on locality. Unpredictable weather patterns and extreme weather events include extended droughts, heatwaves, or severely increased rainfall. These events have a direct impact on the overall health of coffee trees, disease incidence, and the ability to set flowers and produce fruit. In turn, the productivity of trees, farms and entire production regions is highly interdependent on the climate. A draught or flood can eliminate production of an entire crop for one or more seasons.
In macro-terms, weather events in major coffee producing regions cause changes in aggregate production and supply, which increase price volatility in critical commodity exchanges that influence price discovery and price setting across the sector.
Brazil’s 2024 draught is a case in point. After severe draughts and wildfires in Brazil that year, forecasts of production volumes plummeted and triggered concerns about the ability of global coffee stocks to meet growing demand given Brazil’s dominant position as supplier of roughly one third of global coffee. Soon enough, coffee prices surged to more than double historical norms and have remained relatively high for over a year. Severe flooding in Vietnam and Indonesia in November 2025 contribute to expectations of sustained high prices. It should be noted that all three origins are also dominated by monoculture production systems.
Agrochemicals
The widespread promotion of agrochemicals is one of many examples of the coffee sector’s attempts to find quick-fix solutions to larger and systemic challenges, such as small land sizes and declining soil fertility. Rather than pay remunerative prices, offset investment costs, incentivize nature-based practices, or regulate agrichemicals and subsidize nature-based production; industry and governments have allowed and sometimes encouraged intensive monoculture coffee production that relies heavily on agrochemicals.
Aging trees, monoculture and chemical-driven production methods damage soil health, pollute waterways, reduce biodiversity and threaten the natural resources and climactic conditions of production areas. These realities erode the very ecosystems coffee depends on, literally destroying our long-term ability to grow coffee.
They also increase producers’ seasonal and long-term risks, and threaten their financial resilience. Of particular concern is the exposure of farm workers, farmers and their families (including children) to highly hazardous pesticides. And though there can be short-term benefits in the use of agrochemicals, there are serious questions around the business model for farmers in terms of the affordability of products, appropriate application, and long-term dependency on (often imported) products whose benefits could be produced locally and more naturally.
Harvesting potential
Agrochemical dependency and aging monocultures erode soil health, biodiversity, and farmer resilience, while exposing workers and families to hazardous substances. These practices undermine long‑term supply security by degrading the very ecosystems coffee depends on. Price volatility caused primarily by the interaction between deforestation, climate change and monoculture practices highlight the disruption that will continue occurring should the sector fail to take existential climate risk seriously.
In contrast to public claims and questions about ‘who pays?’ for the transition – the problem is not a lack of capital, but a lack of prioritization and collective action across industry, finance, and governments. Without coordinated investment in nature‑based production, dynamic agroforestry, and fair pricing, volatility will deepen and future supply—and the prosperity and dignity of producers—will be jeopardized.
