Restoring Degraded Coffee Landscapes

Ethiopia aims to rehabilitate 15 million hectares of degraded forest landscapes under the Bonn Challenge. At the same time, coffee is highly relevant in Ethiopia with growing needs for suitable coffee lands.

The project aims to help restoring degraded landscapes and to develop relevant and scalable business models to improve the livelihoods of coffee farmer families in Ethiopia.

The pilot region is the Illubabor Forest Ecoregion in the region of the Yayu Biosphere Reserve. In this area population pressure is high and coffee productivity low. But the majority of the local people directly depend on coffee as main income source. Forests are rapidly disappearing and soils severely degrade. The solution: Garden coffee systems reduce pressure on remaining forests and restore degraded soils while significantly improving yields and incomes at farm level. Up to 2,000 farmers will be trained for this until 2021.

The key project outputs are:

• Conceptualization and analysis the feasibility of a scalable, economically viable, low-emission and resilient Garden Coffee production system
• Capacity development of smallholder farmers and farmer organizations on climate-smart agriculture practices
• Communication of the investment-ready business model to relevant stakeholders

This project is part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI). The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) supports this initiative on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag.

This project is partly implemented by Unique forestry and land use GmbH. The funding is supported by Lavazza.