This week's release of the IPCC report makes for dire reading but really it’s conclusions come as no surprise.
Climate change is as we already know, man-made. We are and have been living way beyond our means. Our lifestyle and our way of life is destroying the planet. Simple as. We don’t just need to ease off or stop what we’re doing, we radically and urgently need to change our ways, redesign our systems, start giving back, start protecting, preserving and rejuvenating our planet as we go about our daily lives.
As with everything else coffee has an environmental cost. And if global demand for coffee is expected to triple by 2050 it’s only going to get worse unless we fix it.
Moyee Coffee fares well compared to most. Our coffee produces about 5.4kg of carbon for every kilo of roasted beans versus an industry average of 10-15kg of carbon per kilo of beans. But we still believe we can radically improve on this.
We’ve charted and discussed before the six stages of coffee*. We’ve highlighted where environmental damage can occur – in particular in farming, milling, transport and consumption - and noted the areas we’re focusing on to reduce our environmental impact even further. We’re incentivising farmers to choose low carbon sustainable farming, to compost and use organic inputs, we’re installing solar panels to power our wet mill sustainably and are moving to ship more and more of our coffee by sea rather than air to dramatically reduce our carbon footprint by 2.43kg per kilo of Moyee.
But overall Moyee Coffee’s supply chain actually actually absorb 95 tons more CO2 than we emit. We enjoy carbon surplus of 795 tons partly due to the fact our Single and Double blends are shade grown in the forests of Limmu and Jimma in Ethiopia. But the surplus is also largely due to our own ambitious carbon insetting program at our farm in Mizan Teferi where we are protecting 373 hectares of natural forest. In time we expect our carbon surplus rate to increase our carbon surplus by a further 1,900 tons of CO2. This will be achieved as we roll out our coffee tree planting programme, growing and distributing 400,000 coffee trees through our community nurseries to our coffee farmers.
Certainly there is more we can and must do but these existing actions and policies offer some positivity.
*farming, harvesting and milling, roasting, packaging, transport and consumption/end of life.
This week's release of the IPCC report makes for dire reading but really it’s conclusions come as no surprise. 
