Coffee resilience: building a shared foundation for collaborative place-based investment

This resource was originally published by IDH, Conservation International and Treevaluation.

Coffee producers face climate shocks, ecosystem degradation and volatile markets at the same time, and these pressures make each other worse. This makes it hard for companies to decide where and how to invest, and it puts farmer livelihoods and the long-term future of coffee-producing regions at risk.

This position paper, developed by IDH, Conservation International and Treevaluation, gives companies a shared foundation for understanding and investing in coffee resilience. It treats resilience as more than recovering from shocks, and defines it across three interconnected levels: farms, farming households and landscapes. It also introduces the Coffee Resilience Matrix, which covers three capacities: absorbing shocks, adapting to changing conditions, and transforming when existing systems are no longer enough.

The paper sets out five positions:

• Resilience is a system outcome, so individual farm interventions are not enough on their own.
• Resilience needs absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities.
• Investments should serve a shared vision for coffee, people and ecosystems.
• Shared frameworks should guide how risk is assessed, how investment is made and how results are measured.
• Collective action is key to scaling resilience.

The approach links company sourcing priorities with landscape-level needs and locally defined pathways. Its aim is to move the sector away from fragmented interventions and towards longer-term investment.

The paper draws on industry dialogue convened through the Sustainable Coffee Challenge, co-hosted by IDH with technical support from Treevaluation. In May and June 2026, 34 stakeholders from across the coffee sector tested the emerging concepts. The paper reflects the areas where they agreed most strongly. It is not a formal consensus statement, and the participating organisations have not endorsed it.