Colombian Coffee, and Transparency and Sustainable Economics (Trase)

Colombian coffee is a global industry, and holds important cultural value exemplified through the declaration of the Colombian Coffee Cultural Landscape as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Within Colombia, as well as within most tropical countries, tropical forests are continuously under threat from agriculture, and at the same time, are essential for production of most crops through the provision of services, such as pollination services, water services, and many more. Extensive coffee production greatly impacts ecosystems at various levels. Coffee corporations, along with local producers and distributors, are oftentimes unaware of the dependencies required to grow coffee, the magnitude of this dependency, particularly in terms of pollination, water quantity and quality, watershed sedimentation, or the impacts of production on local ecosystems. And on the importing country side, the European Union has a particular policy interest in importing deforestation free commodities, and with new transparency information, are primed to create new policies linked to purchasing practices. Through the Trase initiative lead by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Global Canopy Program (https://trase.earth), Conservation International is working with a consortium of NGOs, Universities, and other actors to create a transparent Colombian coffee supply chain. We are spatially linking ecosystem dependencies and footprints to coffee supply chain actors, such as cooperatives, exporters, importers, and importing countries. The Trase initiative is the first instance of supply chain transparency linking all coffee corporations working within Colombia to their production regions, and subsequently to their social and environmental impacts, and ecosystem dependencies in those regions.