Study Suggests Coffee Industry Has Been Incentivizing Carbon Storage All Wrong

Incentivizing planting of shade trees to offset intensified full-sun coffee farming can result in more environmental harm than benefit. Protecting existing shade trees on coffee lands is exponentially more effective at carbon storage than planting new trees. More than twice as much above-ground carbon could be lost under coffee farm intensification scenarios than could be gained through even the most ambitious tree-planting efforts. Carbon storage efforts in the coffee industry should prioritize conservation, while planting new trees should be treated as an additional but smaller benefit for both carbon storage and biodiversity. Current carbon market incentives favor planting over protecting standing shade trees.

For more than a century, the act of planting new trees has helped assuage the collective guilt of humans, the beneficiaries of economic progress at the expense of the earth's forests. In recent decades, entire organizations have been built upon the concept that incentivizing new tree planting among farmers can help protect the earth's delicate ecological balance while also achieving corporate sustainability goals - all while giving consumers the fuzzies for a choice well made.

Yet a major new coffee-focused meta analysis published in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment is turning this thinking upside down, suggesting that incentives for planting shade trees to offset intensified full-sun farming may be resulting in more environmental harm than good. The study found that protecting existing shade trees on coffee lands is exponentially more effective at carbon storage.

In fact, more than twice as much above ground carbon could be lost under coffee farm intensification scenarios compared to what could be gained through even the most ambitious tree-planting efforts. The study suggests that carbon storage efforts in the coffee industry should prioritize conservation, while planting new trees should be considered an added, but lesser, environmental benefit, both for carbon storage and biodiversity.

Read at Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine