Coffee resilience: building a shared foundation for collaborative place-based investment
Coffee producers are facing climate shocks, degrading ecosystems and volatile markets all at the same time. These pressures reinforce each other, making it difficult for companies to know where and how to invest, and putting farming livelihoods and the long-term future of coffee-producing regions at risk.
To support a more coordinated response, IDH, Conservation International and Treevaluation have developed a new resource: a shared foundation to help companies understand and invest in coffee resilience.
Resilience is about more than recovering from shocks. This position paper defines resilience across three interconnected levels: farms, farming households and landscapes, and introduces the Coffee Resilience Matrix to help stakeholders consider the capacities needed to withstand shocks, adapt to changing conditions and transform when existing systems are no longer sufficient.
From individual interventions to resilient coffee landscapes
Resilience is a system outcome, and strengthening it requires more than individual farm-level interventions. Companies, governments, investors and other stakeholders need a common way to understand how ecological, economic and institutional conditions interact, and how investment can strengthen the conditions that allow coffee production, farming households and ecosystems to thrive into the future.
We have identified five positions for more coordinated action and investment, each supported by a common definition, vision and framework:
- Resilience is a system outcome.
- Resilience requires strengthening absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities across farms, farming households and landscapes.
- Resilience investments should build towards a shared vision for coffee, people and ecosystems.
- Shared frameworks are needed to guide risk assessment, investment and measurement.
- Collective action is key to unlocking resilience at scale.
By connecting company sourcing priorities with landscape-level needs and locally defined pathways, the program aims to move the sector from fragmented interventions towards longer-term investment in resilient coffee supply, farmer livelihoods and ecosystems.
The paper was informed by 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 emerging concepts and explored where greater alignment could add value. The paper reflects the strongest areas of alignment from that process, but does not represent a formal consensus statement or endorsement by participating organisations.