Keeling Curve

Primary Project Category:

Secondary Project Category:

Name of Project:

Year Project Originated:

Project Summary / Description:

The project was formed based on the social enterprise founders‚ long professional careers in smallholder farming, community empowerment, and environmental preservation. Extensive working with them enables us to understand the paradox of their farming practices. Living in poverty due to limited resources, they ironically waste natural resources, time, money, and energy due to lack of awareness and access to Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), Regenerative Agriculture (RA), and Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Furthermore, climate change impacts make the situation even worse. Considering the paradox and serious threats of climate change, we decide to focus on assisting farmers to optimize their limited natural resources together with mitigating and adapting to climate change. Our approach is high-value commodity development. Coffee is selected as the initial commodity to work for the following reasons:
(1) Coffee is one of the five commodities highly vulnerable to climate change making its supply at risk
(2) The founder and (co) founder have long experiences assisting coffee farmers and a strong network with the coffee supply chain, and 
(3) Coffee supply chain is more ready for responsible and sustainable coffee production and consumption including paying premium prices for coffee produced in a sustainable way. The customers‚ willingness to pay premium prices is vital for project sustainability, replication, and scale-up.

The project was initiated on 18 October 2018 following the founder‚ selection as EPLC Fellow in Korea where he was granted $2,000 for seed funding to develop a project entitled promotion of smallholder coffee farmers‚ adaptation and mitigation to climate change.

Country or Countries of Operation:

Regions of Operations:

How Project Affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions:

This project promotes climate change adaptation and mitigation practices for sustainable coffee production and consumption. Those practices which affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions are agroforestry, rurak (holes to restore nutrients, climate tolerant seedlings, and integrated farming. Integrated farming

Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Sustainable Development Goals:

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

Climate change is putting coffee production and the livelihoods of coffee farmers and their families around the world at risk. it is estimated that about 150,000 of them live in project target areas. They include women, youth, minority ethnics, and indigenous people who all belong to climate-vulnerable communities. Therefore, the project empowers those traditionally underrepresented in the leadership of the climate movement not only to improve their social and economic resilience but also their coffee farms‚ resilience. Most target beneficiaries belong to minority ethnicities who inherit their coffee farms and reside inside or around state forests. 
Through the Training of Trainers (ToT) model, the project will select some representatives from the local community to be local climate champions. They will be intensively trained in various aspects of coffee mitigation and adaptation strategies, social entrepreneurship, organizational management, domestic financial literacy, and gender issues. Youth, women, and disabled people will be prioritized to be local climate champions. Particularly for youth, the project will enhance their pride and security as farmers by raising their awareness of their contribution to global sustainable coffee production and consumption.
For women and youth, key issues are gender and generational inequalities within farming households that mean that the women and youth who often do the most of the work fail to see any benefits because they do not control the land or income from coffee. The project employs the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) ‚ Coffee Happy Family - to improve equal participation in coffee farming and agribusiness including climate movement. The project sets at least a 30% target for women's participation in farmer groups/business entities‚ management including on training and other capacity-building works. 

Since most target beneficiaries belong to indigenous people or minority ethnics, for those farming coffee in the state forest, the project encourages and facilitates them to get Social Forestry Permit to legally enable them to manage their inherited forest and practice local wisdom on environmental preservation and climate change mitigation. The project will assist them to develop a social business plan for coffee agribusiness or other potential business like ecotourism to improve their livelihoods. Furthermore, some local wisdom supporting environmentally-friendly farming practices will be preserved and adopted. The project will facilitate the documentation of the local wisdom to enable sharing of best practices among the target beneficiaries.

Sub-Categories: