Image of coffee agroforestry system located at the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) provided by CATIE. Press photo.
A giant spotlight is being turned on shade-grown coffee with this week’s launch of a freely accessible Coffee Agroforestry E-Library.
The sprawling database of academic literature on agroforestry in coffee comes courtesy of the nonprofit Coffee Watch and tropical research institute CATIE.
It brings together 1,317 references spanning more than 60 years of research that until now have been “scattered across journals, institutions and regions,” according to the organizations. It is designed to speed up evidence-based decision-making among actors throughout the coffee sector.
“By making the science accessible, we can accelerate the transition to coffee landscapes that are shade-grown, climate-resilient and farmer-centered,” Coffee Watch Director Etelle Higonnet said in an announcement of the release. “It aims to serve as a living knowledge base for all stakeholders committed to transforming coffee into a driver of sustainability.”
Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.
Agroforestry — integrating shade trees and diverse crops within coffee farms and surrounding landscapes — is widely promoted as a pathway to climate resilience, carbon storage, biodiversity conservation and more diversified farm income.
In coffee, agroforestry has been employed as a land-management strategy and as a greenwashing tool for corporate sustainability messaging. Thus, the arrival of the e-library comes as the industry grapples with how shade-grown coffee is applied in practice, how its outcomes are measured and how conversions to shade-grown coffee from traditional full-sun systems might be funded.
“It was created to support evidence-based action in the coffee sector, helping stakeholders design shade-grown coffee policies, programs and practices that retain and even increase tree cover in farms and agricultural landscapes, empower farmers and build climate resilience,” CATIE’s Eduardo Somarriba said of the library.
The library itself, which lives on the Zotero platform, follows an academic effort outlined in the journal Agroforestry Systems, with author affiliations pointing to CATIE and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), among other institutions. Higonnet was listed as a funding source for the research.
Higonnet, who launched Coffee Watch in 2024, said the library will be updated as new references emerge.
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Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
