BY RACHEL NORTHROP
SPECIAL TO BARISTA MAGAZINE
There’s an idea percolating among global leaders in sustainability: pay landholders who do the right thing. If so much of the world’s current habits of deforestation and contamination causing land degradation and ecosystem destruction are driven by ”and often justified by ”profit, then sustainable and restorative land management needs to become as monetarily attractive.
Nigel Sizer was named Rainforest Alliance President in January of this year, and is directing the nonprofit back to its roots: forests and partnerships. œAlliance is in our name. We have to work together to build stronger forests, Nigel commented in his opening remarks at the annual Leadership Summit in New York in May.
He argued that, œdeforestation for agriculture doesn’t have a long-term goal of generating more food. Reforestation does. An emerging sense of crisis gives momentum. Smallholder agricultural communities around the world already feel the urgency of responding to the crisis of climate change.
Juana Payaba Cachique, a community leader from Tres Islas, Madre de Dios in Cusco, Peru was the summit’s keynote speaker. Juana worked to organize regional Brazil nut farmers, who partnered with Rainforest Alliance after observing problematic shifts in the region’s climate. œThere’s no clear transition between winter and summer, Juana describes. œWe can’t harvest and process like we used to because there’s no predictability to when it will rain and when it will be sunny. This observation is echoed again and again by coffee producers around the globe.
The C02 Coffee Project in Oaxaca, Mexico, focuses on assessing the mosaic landscape of forest, crops, and pasture and identifying land that could benefit from reforestation. Jeff Hayward, Vice President of Design and Innovation, Global Climate Lead is the project’s coordinator. œPeople are excited about maintaining the resources at their disposal. The primary mover for the project was a young Chitino indigenous woman in her teens,” he said. “But with tree planting sometimes the incentive stream isn’t quite as obvious. Building that awareness takes effort. Promoting additional action takes compensation. Not all reforestation efforts directly lead to timber harvesting or secondary crops that can generate income.
œEcosystem Service Payments could be a way to compensate landholders for the improving the quality of their environment, says Jeff. œFor these types of projects it’s about optimizing the quality of the shade cover and looking for multiple use species within the agroforestry system. Rainforest Alliance is also leading Oaxaca project members towards eligibility for another potential payout: verified carbon credits. œOur technical advisors provided assistance around carbon standards and carbon accounting methodologies, on how to configure a tree planting or ecosystem restoration project into something that could be validated and verified against a carbon standard and potentially generate a transactable carbon credit.
Similarly, the Climate Smart Coffee and Cocoa in the Peruvian Amazon project focuses on conserving biodiversity and improving livelihoods by transforming land use practices. Mark Moroge, Senior Director of Projects in Peru, explained how œmodel farms demonstrate accessible short term practices. Learning and replication sites engage members across the sector and are integrated into a broader technical assistance strategy involving governments and cooperatives, which is helping drive change throughout the agricultural area that buffers conservation preserves.
Nigel closed the summit with a call to action. œSustainable land use offers the opportunity to remove carbon. We already have the technology, we just need to kick it into action. Coffee farms are perfectly poised to lead the way in climate smart, carbon offsetting agriculture.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Northrop is a trader with Ally Coffee out of New York and the author of When Coffee Speaks: Stories from and of Latin American Coffeepeople. As a writer she focuses on covering issues related to the complexities of tropical agriculture and global supply chains.
