Coffee is Peru's leading agricultural export and provides economic livelihoods for more than 225,000 producing families. The sector faces challenges such as poor access to information and technology, creating a knowledge gap for producers. Coffee organisations have little information to make business decisions, and costs are constantly changing. This, combined with the high risks of climate change, makes the use of technologies that take into account local information, as well as training in its understanding and use, an urgent priority.
Knowledge is power, even in the world of coffee. Coffee & Climate is a pilot initiative to raise awareness among coffee producers and technical staff of organisations about the relationship between coffee and carbon emissions/sequestration. Participants come from Cajamarca, Peru's main organic coffee exporting region. They will measure the environmental footprint of each stage of coffee production through a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). They will acquire tools to reduce coffee's footprint during cultivation, harvest and post-harvest stages.
Measuring the impact of agroforestry systems on coffee plots will be key to scaling up data from the region. We will do so based on the case of the coffee organisation Unicafec. We will use the Calcafé environmental impact calculator, in partnership with PromPerú/Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism of Peru (MINCETUR) as part of the government's Coffee Environmental Footprint Programme, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú PUCP. We will scale up the evidence with members of the Cajamarca Coffee Multi-Stakeholder Platform.
The project consists of 5 interlinked phases:
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