New framework seeks to strengthen resilience across coffee-producing landscapes
NEW YORK, September 27, 2026 – The Sustainable Coffee Challenge has introduced a new position paper, Coffee Resilience: Building a Shared Foundation for Collaborative Place-Based Investment, establishing a common basis for accelerating coordinated action and investment across coffee-producing landscapes as the sector navigates growing climate, nature and market risks.
The publication launches broader industry efforts to align stakeholders around a common understanding of resilience and provides 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 seeks to address this gap by establishing a shared foundation for how the sector defines, understands and approaches resilience.
Developed by Conservation International, IDH 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,” said Raina Lang, Managing Director, Sustainable Coffee, at Conservation International. “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, which organises actions to strengthen resilience across three levels of the coffee system – farms, farming households and landscapes – and three forms of resilience capacity: absorptive, adaptive and transformative.
The paper is the first instalment in a broader Coffee Resilience Series, which 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 landscape scale.
Mette-Marie Hansen, Programme Director, Coffee, at IDH, said: “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.
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