Sustainable coffee challenge sets out common ground for coffee resilience
Position paper establishes foundation to align industry action and investment across coffee-producing landscapes
NEW YORK (September 21, 2026) – Today, the Sustainable Coffee Challenge introduced a new position paper, Coffee Resilience: Building a Shared Foundation for Collaborative Place-Based Investment, establishing a common basis to accelerate coordinated action and investment across coffee-producing landscapes while the sector navigates growing climate, nature and market risks.
The publication serves to launch broader industry efforts to align stakeholders around a common understanding of resilience and provide practical guidance for strengthening the long-term viability of coffee production.
Resilience refers to the ability of coffee farms, farmers and landscapes to withstand and recover from climate shocks, adapt to changing conditions and transform when existing systems are no longer sufficient.
Companies, investors, and development organisations often assess and address resilience using different frameworks and approaches. Through a collaborative process involving industry stakeholders, the Sustainable Coffee Challenge is seeking to address this gap by establishing a shared foundation for how the sector defines, understands and approaches resilience.
Developed by IDH, Conservation International and Treevaluation, the foundational publication provides the coffee sector with a common language for understanding resilience. It introduces a shared definition, a practical resilience framework and a vision for what resilient coffee-producing landscapes should look like.
The future of coffee depends on the resilience of the landscapes where it is grown. Companies increasingly recognise that resilience cannot be built in isolation. This is a new foundation the sector can use to align investment, strengthen collaboration and accelerate action in the regions most critical to coffee's future.
The paper also introduces a Coffee Resilience Matrix that organises resilience to help organise actions that increase resilience across three levels of the coffee system – farms, farming households and landscapes – and three forms of resilience capacity: absorptive, adaptive and transformative. This is the first instalment in a broader Coffee Resilience Series that will explore three critical questions facing the sector: how resilience risks can be assessed and prioritised, how resilience outcomes should be measured and how financing can be mobilised and coordinated at the landscape scale.
The difficulty for companies is not recognising that coffee faces serious risks, it is knowing where to invest when climate shocks, farm vulnerability and ecosystem degradation are all connected. This paper gives the sector a shared way to understand resilience across farms, farming households and landscapes, which will help companies make better-informed, more coordinated, and ultimately more impactful investments.
The Sustainable Coffee Challenge, Conservation International and IDH invite companies, governments, investors, researchers and implementation partners to engage in shaping the next phase of the Coffee Resilience Series and advancing coordinated action across priority coffee-producing landscapes.
About the Sustainable Coffee Challenge: The Sustainable Coffee Challenge is a global coalition convened by Conservation International that brings together more than 120 partners across the coffee sector to accelerate collaborative action toward a resilient, net-zero and nature-positive future for coffee through aligned ambition, innovative guidance and coordinated investment.
About Conservation International: Conservation International protects nature for the benefit of humanity. Through science, policy, fieldwork and finance, we spotlight and secure the most important places in nature for the climate, for biodiversity and for people. With offices in 30 countries and projects in more than 100 countries, Conservation International partners with governments, companies, civil society, Indigenous Peoples and local communities to help people and nature thrive together. Go to Conservation.org for more, and follow our work on From the Field, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
About IDH: IDH is a global organisation that unlocks the full potential of agricultural markets to address complex social and environmental challenges. Drawing on nearly two decades of trusted experience, we turn market insight and practical expertise into solutions anchored in sourcing practices, partnerships and investment decisions. We help build systems that endure beyond our contribution, resulting in value chains that generate shared value for all.