Digitizing African Coffee Industries To Better Tackle Climate Change – CoffeeTalk

The recent COP29 and Climate Week NYC 2024 events highlight the urgency of climate action, with stakeholders united in their commitment to advance net zero and sustainability goals. However, the HOW remains under discussion, particularly in Africa, where the coffee sector offers an ideal use case for developing a digitally-enabled, sustainable solution that advances climate and economic goals in tandem for the region.

For Africa, sustainability is an urgent commercial imperative driven by regulations in large export markets like the EU, with 13-17% of exports in Ethiopia and Uganda exposed to a single regulation – the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). This requires coordinated, cohesive action across policy, tech, and finance arenas, as digital traceability systems offer the key to tracking coffee from farm-to-table. Official forestry maps would need to be overlaid with farm data to triangulate that no deforestation has taken place.

To mitigate against a potential cratering of coffee exports and related jobs in Africa, several strategies can be implemented. First, build granular GIS-enabled datasets of forest cover baselines in 2020 and collect farm-level data on current forest cover to confirm the status of deforestation. A cost-effective digital solution, financed jointly by public and private resources, would be needed to scale this central aspect of compliance. Second, target investments towards digitalization of the coffee value chain, enhancing and scaling up farm-to-table traceability systems to track coffee from deforested land to its entry into the EU. Third, enhance enactment and implementation of country-level regulations on deforestation to avoid ‘high-risk’ categorization which may lead to immediate suspension from exporting coffee to the EU market.

Although the application of the law has been delayed till December 30, 2025, there is no time to lose as the solutions would need to be tested and scaled up across the value chains. Key industry stakeholders are already building solutions to address specific aspects of the challenge, such as Rainforest Alliance expanding its certification process to include data needed for compliance with EUDR.

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