Focus on Arts and Ecology

One-third of projects may have gone ahead even without the credit revenue, new research reveals. 

By Christian Shepherd, April 21, 2026

Methane is behind around 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. The largest share of emissions comes from agriculture, primarily livestock digestion and the decomposition of manure and other organic matter. In China, the energy sector is the largest source, with agriculture a close second.

Emissions offsets designed to curb farmyard methane via improved manure management used to be rare. Only about two projects were proposed per year in 2006 to 2021. Then interest surged. Around a hundred new projects applied for inclusion in markets between 2022 and 2024, according to public registries.

The vast majority of those were pig farms in China, which promised to replace open-air slurry pits with waste management systems that capture and reuse methane to produce heat, electricity or fertiliser.

Credits from these projects have been purchased by a wide range of global buyers, from major oil and gas giants such as Shell and China National Petroleum Corporation, to Chinese battery maker CATL and the University of Melbourne, the registriesshow.

But new research by CarbonPlan, a climate advocacy group based in California, found that nearly a third of the associated carbon credits may not deliver real climate benefits. The findings is part of a global trend of carbon offsets failing to live up to their billing, experts told Dialogue Earth.

Would the projects have happened anyway?

CarbonPlan’s analysis, which has yet to undergo peer review, hinges on the concept of “additionality.” It asks: would this have happened anyway? Projects that need credit revenues to be financially viable are considered additional. But projects that make operational changes because they deliver economic returns without credit revenues – or because such changes are required by local regulations or evolving industry standards – should be considered “non-additional” and excluded from markets.

Out of 74 pig farms in China that stated plans to use captured biogas to generate heat or electricity, 18 projects – or 31% of the potential annual supply of this kind of carbon credit – were “non-additional,” meaning estimated energy generation from biogas saved the farms enough money to make the project financially viable without credit revenue, according to the report.

CarbonPlan calculated their additionality threshold – by comparing self-reported project data on factors such as the number of pigs and heat output from burned biogas against energy cost estimates from the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s state planner.

Four researchers who track voluntary carbon markets or Chinese agricultural policies vouched for the general methodology.

Gold Standard, one of the two credit certifiers that verified the projects, said that it would carefully review CarbonPlan’s report and declined to comment on individual projects or project developers. “Additionality assessments are based on a comprehensive evaluation of financial, technical and operational factors, rather than any single indicator, such as energy self-sufficiency,” the organisation said in an emailed response to questions.

A spokesperson for the other credit certifier, Verra, said the organisation “will look into the specific projects if required” but that the report’s methodology was too broad for the conclusions drawn – applying provincial energy cost averages “across all farms in a province, without accounting for variability in farm size and configuration, fixed electricity costs,” and other project-specific factors.

The findings raise serious questions about widespread lapses in data reliability and quality-control by registries and third-party verifiers, said Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at CarbonPlan who co-authored the article.

“There is strong evidence of non-additionality throughout the carbon market – including renewable energy, forestry, cookstove, and now pig manure management projects,” Badgley said. “Absent serious reform, consumers should treat any environmental claim backed by offsets with scepticism.”

Voluntary carbon markets face credibility concerns

The findings come amid a global reckoning for the voluntary carbon market. Confidence in the value of offset credits has been undermined by widespread accusations of overstated emissions reductions, unverifiable climate claims and fraud. That loss of faith has intensified long-standing complaints of greenwashing by businesses who buy credits to avoid cutting their own emissions.

In 2024, a Dialogue Earth investigation into rice cultivation credits found little evidence of farmers using the advertised methane-curbing irrigation methods. That scandal has continued to reverberate through markets: Climate Home News reported in December that Verra compensated buyers of those bogus offsets with other junk credits.

Standard-setting agencies have tried to restore confidence with stricter quality control. Because methane has 27 to 30 times the atmosphere-warming potential of carbon dioxide over 100 years, methane projects were generally considered higher quality than scandal-plagued credits from forest conservation or rice paddy irrigation.

CarbonPlan’s analysis casts doubt on that assumption. Take, for example, a project comprising eight swine farms in southern Guangdong province. Certified by Gold Standard, the project has since 2021, seen over 700,000 credits issued based on annual emissions reductions of 423,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

CarbonPlan estimated that the biogas-fuelled generators involved in the project would produce enough electricity to meet all project needs, indicating it would likely have gone ahead without climate finance. The savings of nearly CNY 13 million (USD 2 million) per year were absent from financial statements.

Even using the most conservative assumptions, there remained “surprising inconsistencies” between the expected savings and what projects disclosed, the report’s authors wrote. These inconsistencies could be explained in part by shoddy paperwork or projects providing incomplete cost-benefit analyses to verifiers, but even so, the findings raise concerns about the verification process, they concluded.

Voluntary carbon markets that grew out of Kyoto Protocol mechanisms were meant to let buyers fund emissions cuts elsewhere to encourage the adoption of climate-friendly technologies and practices in places that might otherwise lack the finances or incentive to take action. But repeated scandals have increasingly undermined the market’s credibility.

Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, who reviewed the research, said that CarbonPlan’s count looked conservative in light of his review of a growing body of research attesting to widespread overcrediting from multiple project types worldwide.

“It’s endemic and across the board,” Romm said. “The buyer and seller are both incentivised to exaggerate [the climate benefits of credits].”

The usual way to solve concerns of non-additionality is through more robust financial analysis that shows projects are not profitable without credit revenues, said Quirin Oberpriller, an associate partnerat INFRAS, an environmental consulting group based in Switzerland.

That means that the gaps in reporting identified by CarbonPlan are inherently problematic: It “doesn’t make sense” to claim to cut emissions by using biogas but not include the corresponding saving in energy cost in financial statements, Oberpriller said. “If this is the case, it is obviously flawed.”

Incentives, intended and unintended

While pig farms account for a relatively small portion of China’s total methane emissions compared to leakage from coal mines, improved manure management has been identified by the government as an important part of curbing output. In its 2023 methane control plan, the government set a goal of reusing over 85% of livestock manure by 2030.

The agriculture ministry has since at least the 2010s urged farms to implement manure treatment projects to curb water pollution and to reuse biogas, said Fred Gale, a former economist at the US Department of Agriculture. That long-standing push involved a series of subsidised demonstration projects designed to encourage the industry as a whole not to dump slurry in unlined, uncovered pits.

“Farms have been building manure collection or treatment facilities for years, before anyone heard of carbon credits,” Gale said. “I doubt a new farm would be approved without some manure utilisation facility.”

But there may be other drivers behind the sudden increase in farmyard methane credits from China. The uptick also came soon after a major overhaul in the country’s pig farming industry sparked by a severe outbreak of African swine fever in 2018 that resulted in about half of China’s total herd being culled.

Hundreds of backyard farms were closed, as the outbreak accelerated a state-led drive that favoured industrial-scale breeders with modern waste-management systems over smaller operations. Large-scale breeders invested in huge concrete barns that house hundreds of swine, often referred to as “pig hotels” in Chinese media. And the government significantly tightened environmental standards and launched crackdowns on polluting farms that flaunted waste-management rules.

Those regulatory pressures may have incentivised cash-strapped farmers to seek funding from the carbon markets for upgrades already encouraged by the state, Gale said.

At the same time, many breeders faced significant upfront costs from the construction of huge facilities. Many operated at a loss as they rebuilt herds. Soon afterward, the market over-corrected: farmers bred too many pigs, creating a supply glut that tanked prices and compounded cost pressures – a problem that has continued until today.

“It’s not clear that pig farms in China would have been able to scrape together the cash to build these projects – at that time, in that economic context – if it wasn’t for their ability to get offsets,” said Even Pay, a director at research firm Trivium China who reviewed CarbonPlan’s research.

While effective waste-management projects can pay for themselves over time – even without credits – Pay said it was possible that some Chinese pig breeders operating under extreme price volatility needed the additional incentive of credit revenue to adopt emissions-curbing practices.

China’s agricultural sector still lags behind energy and heavy industry when it comes to access to the financial, technical and policy support needed to prioritise emissions cuts, Pay said: “The sooner that a wide range of funding tools are available, the better.”

Christian Shepherd

Burning stubble in the fields had been largely banned since 1999, but local governments are now allowing the practice in some circumstances. 

By Liu Lican, April 15, 2026

China’s new Ecological and Environmental Code, approved on 12 March, includes a requirement for scientific and accurate “organisation and management of straw burning.”

Experts say this marks a shift from a fairly comprehensive ban, focused on air quality, towards balancing the needs of the environment and farmers. The move could be seen as an acknowledgement that the original policy harmed livelihoods while benefiting the environment.

For over 20 years, burning straw in China’s fields had been subject to a central government ban which was more strictly implemented in the north of the country. With considerable effort and cost, the practice was largely eliminated. But over the last two years, some local governments have begun relaxing the ban in certain conditions, such as when wind speed and rainfall are favourable for smoke dispersion.

The two-decade process – from a simple ban to a cautious relaxation – has seen policymakers respond to public concerns. As we will see, they have taken into account the use and availability of technology, carrot-and-stick approaches and trade-offs between the economy and the environment.

It represents a good example of the complexities of environmental governance in China.

From resource to waste: Straw needed no more

Straw in this context means the stalks left behind after the harvesting of crops including wheat, rice, corn, tubers, oil crops, cotton and sugar.

The practice of burning it in the fields is relatively new. For thousands of years, it had been a valuable resource used both domestically and commercially: as fodder for livestock and as fuel for heating and cooking, with the ashes then becoming fertiliser. It was also used as thatch, in bricks, to make brooms, as padding, and even in arts and crafts.

But from the 1990s, farmers started burning that once-useful resource in the fields.

Partly, this was because increasing food production meant more straw supply, just as demand was decreasing. Mechanisation led to less need for straw as fodder for working animals; coal and electricity were replacing straw for heating and cooking. Shifting straw out of the fields was a laborious and expensive process. With younger rural residents moving to the cities to find work and leaving behind only older workers, it was no longer possible to collect and process the straw during busy harvest periods. And in general, for farmers, the straw burning reduced pests and diseases for the next crop better than did working it back into the field.

The burning usually took place after the summer and autumn harvests – roughly in May or June, and then September to November. During harvest, crops need to be dried, sorted, packaged and stored, all within a week or two. Then the fields need to be prepared: straw dealt with, soil ploughed, fertiliser and pesticides applied, water and seeds added. Any hiccups, such as an untimely rain, can delay these processes. Dealing with the straw is one of the toughest and most time consuming of these tasks.

So, with mechanisation increasing, energy use changing, and less labour available in the fields, straw became a waste product which it made sense to burn.

The 1999 ban

The burning led to fires that got out of control, polluted the atmosphere and caused health problems. It also impeded transportation by reducing visibility, damaged soil structure and was unpleasant for residents.

Research published in 2025 gathered data from 156 city-level jurisdictions, covering the years 2015 to 2020. It found levels of atmospheric pollutants increased for three days after a straw burning incident. The ban has always been most strictly enforced in Beijing and nearby, but even then straw burning last June caused a spike in air pollution in Langfang, to Beijing’s south.

Beyond the smoke and ash affecting the eyes and respiratory system, substances in the smoke such as benzopyrene and dioxins can also cause cardiovascular disease and cancer. Research from 2020 found that every extra ten straw-burning locations within a 50 km radius of a county centre resulted in a 7.62% increase in levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution and a 1.56% rise in death rates.

In 1999, a national policy on straw burning and straw recycling was published. The Environmental Protection Bureau (now the Ministry of Ecology and Environment) was the lead authority behind the policy, with the ministries of agriculture and finance, and the road, rail and aviation authorities also involved. That the transportation authorities were involved shows this was never a simple matter of air pollution and public health.

The only areas specified in the ban were surrounding transport infrastructure: within 15 km of airports; 2 km of expressways, national highways and railways; and 1 km of provincial trunk roads. This suggests transportation safety was the main cause of the ban.

It was tightened up in 2008, as Beijing held the Olympic Games, with complete bans across Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and Liaoning. Roughly speaking, the closer you got to Beijing, the stricter the ban.

Although the straw-burning bans were implemented under an environmental banner, it has never been about air quality targets alone: there have always been more important aims for government, including traffic safety and major events.

The straw ban combo: punishments, enforcement, incentives

For over 20 years, central and local governments have been issuing rules and guidance on the burning, disposal and recycling of straw. Ultimately, implementation lies almost entirely in the hands of the grassroots: county-level environmental authorities and township and county cadres, for whom it is one more part of an already heavy workload.

About 10 years ago, Hebei had 80,000 township and over 600,000 village cadres participating in work to monitor and stop straw burning. In Heilongjiang, cadres from township chiefs to village officials are on 24-hour watch for straw burning during the two peak periods. If satellites detect straw burning, local governments in some regions can have CNY 100,000 (USD 15,000) deducted from their funding, so it’s a high-pressure time. According to a report from 2024, one county in Heilongjiang spent CNY 100,000 just on food and drink for the officials monitoring straw burning after the autumn harvest.

Local officials who fail to stop straw burning can face sanctions. Township and village officials can be called in to explain themselves; environmental bureau chiefs and township party secretaries can be suspended for investigation; while village party secretaries can lose their posts.

Punishments vary for those doing the actual straw burning. Hebei, for example, imposes fines of CNY 500 to 1,500. More terrifying, perhaps, are the slogans used to persuade people to obey the law: “Burn straw in the morning, do time in the evening” and “Set fire to the fields, and you’ll end up in jail”.

But alongside the stick of the ban, the government has always used the carrot of incentives. In 2022, central government provided straw-recycling subsidies to the tune of CNY 14 billion. They don’t just go to the farmers. They also fund the processing of straw and use of straw products, including the purchase of machinery, preferential power prices and transportation costs.

Yao Zonglu, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, says that in 2022 China produced 865 million tonnes of straw, 88% of which was recycled. Most is shredded and returned to the soil as fertiliser, either tilled into the earth or left on the surface. And much of the rest is removed and processed into fodder or burned as biofuel.

The 1999 straw-burning policy required recycling rates of 85% by 2005. A 2023 plan on continuing air quality improvements said rates were steady at 86%.

That means that even after nearly 25 years of strict controls, more than 10% of China’s straw is not being reused, and some of it is being burned. What has made farmers risk the legal and economic consequences?

Labour, costs, pests, disease

As mentioned, recycling straw from the fields is hard work. Moving straw from 3 mu (0.2 hectares) of land takes two strong workers three days. China, though, has a severe lack of agricultural labour, and most of those working in the fields are older or women. For many, there simply isn’t the time to do this when it needs to be done.

Even using the straw in situ as fertiliser adds two processes: shredding, then tilling the shredded straw back into the soil. Ten years ago, a China Agricultural University professor, Xie Guanghui, calculated that one mu of land earned about CNY 800, while inputs like seeds and fertiliser would cost CNY 200. Returning straw to the soil adds an extra CNY 100 in costs.

Such returning is also complex work. There are various ways of processing it, depending on what the original crop was, what will be planted next, and regional and soil conditions. Different machinery can be needed, with variable costs and timings.

Farmers often prefer to burn the straw as the potassium-rich ash is itself an excellent natural fertiliser. The main reason farmers oppose the ban, though, is that burning kills off pests and diseases. The prohibition led to a significant uptick in those problems. Keeping yields up has required increased use of fertiliser and other chemicals, which adds costs and goes against the original environmental aims of the ban. In effect, tackling an air pollution problem has worsened an agricultural chemical pollution problem.

Farmers aren’t opposed to recycling their straw – if it doesn’t add labour and other costs, if it doesn’t affect the next season’s crop, and if it doesn’t worsen pests and diseases. But while those issues remain unresolved, they still have motive to burn.

Local relaxation followed up at central level

In response to widespread calls for a relaxation, in 2023 the agriculture and environment ministries carried out a survey of the ban and straw recycling across eight provinces. That process concluded that the ban should continue but with a shift of emphasis to recycling and making straw more valuable.

Hunan, Guangxi and Yunnan had already allowed burning in certain cases. There was also partial evidence that air pollution might not be a problem: the city of Guigang in Guangxi allowed orderly straw burning for four years, yet saw air quality improve.

In 2024, several delegates attending the Two Sessions called for the ban to be adjusted, mostly because of pest and disease issues. Cao Xiaogeng, a delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had studied various locations and found that returning straw to the soil increases incidence of pests and diseases by 9.5%. A delegate also pointed out that long cold winters in the north-east mean straw does not decompose to fertilise the fields.

The 2025 version of the No. 1 Central Document – an annual statement of central government’s agricultural policy for the year ahead – offered support for straw recycling but also said the scope of the ban should be precise and in line with laws and regulations. The agriculture ministry’s interpretation was that this was to end the general nationwide ban on straw burning in favour of “limited” burning. Environmental capacity, soil conditions and agricultural characteristics would determine where burning could take place.

Also in 2025, Hunan ruled that straw affected by pests or disease could be burned in certain cases. Even the environment ministry’s official outlet described this as responding to public concerns and solving the problems caused by a general ban.

A less obvious problem than pests and diseases is the shrinking and aging of the agricultural workforce. This makes recycling straw more and more difficult and means local officials work exhausting schedules to stop burning, with overtime payments draining government coffers. The burning ban has been strictly enforced, but more recently some local governments have explored the permitting of limited burning, with a top-down relaxation finally coming in 2025.

The ban’s limits and negative outcomes

The ban has had considerable positive outcomes but, as mentioned, has been unable to get straw recycling rates past the 90% mark. And as straw burning is widely scattered and generally on a smaller scale, it is hard to manage centrally.

Are the costs of the ban, both in terms of government spending on enforcement and agricultural labour, now outstripping the benefits? More importantly, does the policy have negative outcomes, imposing costs?

A 2025 systematic review found that straw burning does not take place in isolation. It is the outcome of a combination of agricultural modernisation and structural, technological and socio-cultural factors. For the farmers, burning is the logical choice. When environmental requirements trump farmers’ needs, problems with labour shortages, costs and pests and diseases can arise. The policy has brought environmental benefits but led to hardships and losses for farmers.

As far as possible, policy should aim to benefit people without harming others. The implementation, debate and changes of the ban over the past two decades, and the shift from an general ban to a more limited and scientific approach, has given us a lesson, if late, on governance.

In Minas Gerais state, rising prices are steering some small-scale farmers from the sustainable practices that can mitigate climate change. 

By Kevin Damasio, April 17, 2026

Edson Paes, 53, has single-handedly cultivated 12,000 organic Arabica coffee plants on three hectares of land since he was 14. His life’s work grows in the town of Poço Fundo, southern Minas Gerais. This state in south-eastern Brazil is one of the country’s main coffee growing regions.

In recent years, however, his work has become increasingly difficult because of climate change. He says a drought last year brought 45 days without rain: “The coffee suffered a lot.” Rising temperatures are also taking their toll. On his land, coffee leaves with brownish spots reveal sunscald, a problem linked to temperatures too high for cultivation. “Standing all day under this sun is getting difficult,” Paes tells Dialogue Earth on a hot January afternoon.

Paes is far from alone in facing these challenges. Five consecutive Arabica coffee harvests have been affected by climatic events such as heatwaves, droughts and frosts. A study by Brazil’s Federal University of Itajubá (Unifei) published in 2024 indicates that, as global warming and water stress intensify, between 35% and 75% of the areas in Brazil currently planted with Arabica coffee could become economically unviable by the end of the century.

These climate-related challenges have pushed up prices as the global supply tightens. Even with shipments falling by 20% between 2024 and 2025, Brazil – already the world’s leading coffee producer and exporter – registered record export revenue of USD 15.5 billion last year.

Asia is becoming the new growth centre of the global coffee market, with rising consumption in China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam turning the region into a major force as it shapes demand, café culture and future industry trends.

A region driven by coffee

Coffee “makes everything happen” in Poço Fundo, according to Rosiel de Lima, the town’s mayor. Its 16,000 inhabitants rely on family farming as the driving force of the local economy. Many of the beans are destined for export. Almost all of Paes’s production is sent to Europe, Japan and the US via Coopfam, a cooperative comprising nearly 500 family farmers that is currently seeking authorisation to export to China.

For Coopfam, entering the Chinese market is a strategic growth opportunity beyond its traditional European buyers, which currently absorb more than 90% of its exports. The cooperative sees China’s fast-growing coffee demand as an “infinite potential” market.

Another coffee farmer and member of Coopfam, Lima lost 75% of his crop in a hail storm in 2021. Last year, a drought in the middle of the rainy season reduced the quality of the beans, contributing to a 40% drop in his coffee income.

“Every year there’s some kind of adverse weather: hail, frost, cold winds, drought, rain during flowering, at the wrong time,” explains the mayor.

Many producers are adapting by replacing older plants with varieties that are more productive, and resistant to water stress and disease.

Others, like Paes, are using trees to help protect their crops. He has planted cedar and African mahogany trees to shade his coffee plants. He also practises techniques that improve the soil’s moisture retention, such as applying more fertiliser and keeping the earth between the coffee trees covered by planting grasses and legumes. Confident in this year’s harvest, he holds up a branch laden with beans. But then he adds: “You see a good patch of coffee, but right in front of it, another that has none. It’s not as uniform as it used to be.”

“It’s like this in practically all the plantations in the area,” says Alexander Ferreira, an agricultural engineer and technician at Coopfam.

Over the past four years, producers have spent over BRL 40 million (USD 7.9 million) in federal loans on restoring coffee crops, almost all of it in Minas Gerais state, where climate change is already altering the production calendar and yields. The author of Unifei’s 2024 study, Cássia Gabriele Dias, is a meteorologist and researcher at the university. She explains that droughts have become longer, heat has intensified and rainfall has become more irregular in the state. This affects crucial stages, such as flowering and the formation of coffee beans.

Most of the coffee plantations in Minas Gerais are concentrated at higher altitudes, mitigating the effects of global warming – for the time being (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

The soil on Douglas Lago’s coffee plantation in Santa Rita de Caldas retains more moisture because he plants grass, which keeps the earth covered and reduces evaporation during heatwaves (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

Most of the coffee plantations in Minas Gerais are concentrated at higher altitudes, which, for the time being, mitigates the effects of global warming. “Regions further south, such as southern Minas Gerais, tend to remain more suitable. But they are not free from risks,” Dias tells Dialogue Earth.

Lima says the rise in coffee prices has provided some compensation to producers affected by the climate. According to Ferreira, the price of a 60 kg bag of conventional coffee in early 2025 shot up to more than double the 2023 price.

Organic production suffers

However, the costs of maintaining productivity in the face of climate change are rising, reducing real profits. Rosângela Paiva and her husband, Luis Carlos, are considering installing irrigation to cope with the increasingly frequent periods of heat and drought, particularly between July and October when flowering occurs.

Rosângela Paiva is considering installing an irrigation system on her plantation to cope with intensifying heat and droughts; she says coffee production has become very expensive (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

Coopfam’s production supervisor surveys its coffee packing machines. The cooperative is currently seeking authorisation to export to China (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

“Producing today is very expensive,” complains Paiva. In Poço Fundo, she cultivates 5.5 hectares for Coopfam’s organic coffee line. Following organic methods, which avoids the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, can increase coffee production costs by up to 30%.

Strong demand has led producers to prioritise quick gains in productivity, thus switching from organic to non-organic farming. At Coopfam, the number of organic members has fallen by almost 60% in two years, to 75 coffee farmers.

Ferreira estimates that organic coffee will once again become more financially advantageous when the supply of beans stabilises in the market, which could happen as early as this harvest. More stable weather conditions this year have led Conab, the government agency responsible for agricultural supply statistics and policies, to forecast a record harvest for 2026: sixty-six million bags, almost half of which will be produced in Minas Gerais. Rosana Mendes and Avair de Oliveira, also based in Poço Fundo, switched from organic to non-organic farming in 2025. They say they apply pesticides to grasses and weeds only, not to the coffee plants. Furthermore, Coopfam’s European Fairtrade certification prohibits or restricts the use of the more potent pesticides, such as glyphosate, which provides a layer of environmental protection even for non-organic crops.

Some Poço Fundo coffee farmers have decided to move away from organic methods and return to pesticide use in response to rising costs, but are applying them more judiciously than before (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

The couple have also replanted their coffee crop with more productive and resilient Arabica varieties – a strategy that has been gaining ground among producers in southern Minas Gerais. With these adaptations, they plan to increase production by 260% by 2027.

“The future of coffee farming is a mystery,” says Mendes. “We are studying and learning every day from the climate, from nature, from the plant itself, to adapt to whatever is necessary.”

The power of trees

To mitigate the adverse impacts of extreme weather, tree-shaded coffee plantations like Paes’s are gaining ground among small-scale producers in southern Minas Gerais. João Ademir Pereira has planted ipê (Tabebuia), pear, cambucá (Plinia edulis) and yellow jabuticaba (Plinia cauliflora) trees on a third of the three hectares he cultivates here. “The trees help balance the climate and soften the sun,” he says.

In the shade, the coffee trees produce a crop every year; without it, they tend to alternate between seasons of high and low yield. For this cycle, Pereira expects to harvest more than 30 bags per hectare, which is in line with the national average. Almost all his harvest is destined for export.

Preserved Atlantic Forest trees stand next to a coffee plantation in Santa Rita de Caldas, a town neighbouring Poço Fundo. Small-scale producers are harnessing the benefits provided by trees to stabilise their crops (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)   

In partnership with German coffee roaster Tchibo, which buys Coopfam coffee, the Minas Gerais Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology (IFMG) is researching ways to control pests. These include the leaf miner, a larva that burrows into the leaves and damages the beans. Irregular rainfall and above-average temperatures encourage its spread, but studies suggest the fruit and flowers of trees planted amongst the coffee plants attract predatory wasps that help control these infestations.

“We need to support small-scale farmers, because they are the most vulnerable to climate change,” says Lêda Gonçalves, an agricultural engineer and lecturer at the institute.

At an altitude of over a thousand metres, the mist and morning dew cool Douglas Lago’s coffee trees in Santa Rita de Caldas, a town neighbouring Poço Fundo. With plans to start exporting, his family has converted three hectares of degraded pasture into a coffee plantation for the new harvest, adding to six hectares already cultivated.

In contrast to tales of drought and extreme heat, Lago’s crop has been threatened by excessive cold. In 2021, a severe frost killed 60% of the family’s 10,000 plants. After replanting, another frost wiped out a further 2,500. “The climate is our biggest challenge,” says Lago.

Heavy summer rain approaches Lago’s plantation in Santa Rita de Caldas. The region’s irregular rainfall is prompting producers to plant trees that help protect their coffee crops (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

Lago’s family has planted trees to mitigate these climate impacts. As well as offering protection from the heat, they cushion their coffee crops from hail storms. The family has also increased the density of their coffee plants to reduce water stress, and they keep native bees, which boost the pollination and nutrition of the beans. “If there’s no rain, there’s no water in the bean; if there’s no water in the bean, it doesn’t produce the sugar that coffee needs,” explains Lago.

The results are clear to see. Over the past two harvests, the family has achieved yields twice the national average. Last year, they won the speciality coffee competition organised by the cooperatives of Minas Gerais.

By turning to trees for solutions, coffee farmers like Lago are taking their first steps into agroforestry, a technique that remains largely unexplored in the region. This approach takes inspiration from Arabica’s native environment – the tropical highlands of Ethiopia. While planting trees in coffee plantations can assist in reducing heat and wind, comprehensive agroforestry integrates trees into a more complex system, in which they regulate soil moisture and the flow of water, carbon and nutrients. Agroforestry can create a more stable environment in which to grow coffee.

“Agroforestry is more self-sufficient,” explains Rafael Furtado, a local farmer with a master’s in agroecology and rural development. “It produces more resources than the system requires and relies less on external inputs.”

Rafael Furtado has turned to agroforestry systems for his two-hectare Poço Fundo coffee farm, and is seeking organic certification with a view to exporting the results (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

Furtado says the productivity of his farm is not satisfactory yet – but he has achieved ‘really good quality’ coffee (Image: Lucas Ninno / Dialogue Earth)

A study published in 2020 by the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment indicates agroforestry systems can mitigate the effects of extreme weather. Projecting ahead to the year 2050, the study concludes that agroforestry could preserve up to 75% of Brazil’s coffee-growing areas.

When Furtado moved to his two-hectare farm in Poço Fundo four years ago, he inherited a coffee plantation that had relied on pesticides and chemical fertilisers. Since then, he has been eliminating synthetic inputs and developing an agroforestry system.

“My productivity hasn’t been satisfactory so far, but we’ve already achieved a really good quality,” says the farmer.

Furtado is now working to make his agroforestry system economically viable: accessing government credit for family farms; seeking organic certification with a view to exporting; testing new varieties and assessing which crops grown alongside coffee can earn an income, such as bananas, avocados and African mahogany.

The Brazilian government’s Pronaf Agroecologia fund provides up to BRL 250,000 (USD 50,000) per farmer to finance organic or agroecological practices. But as the most recent 12-month data release shows, financing totalled just BRL 10 million across all family farming sectors, from vegetables to cacao and coffee. International sustainable finance remains similarly early-stage: the Chinese agriculture business platform, COFCO International, is running a carbon footprint pilot for Brazilian coffee; Europe’s Rabo Foundation, together with COFCO, has launched a BRL 1.6 million impact-credit line for water resilience in Minas Gerais.

Furtado says coffee agroforestry still has “very low uptake” in Brazil due to a lack of technical knowledge, the need for more complex management, and greater returns in quality than in productivity. Even so, he sees this model as the best solution in the face of growing climate challenges.

“Once there is more research, institutional support and greater experience, it will be far more worthwhile to adopt this more diversified and complex system than to remain in monoculture in a scenario of climate extremes,” he says.

Kevin Damasio

Kevin Damasio is a Brazilian journalist and writer focused on social and environmental issues, including works published on the Rio Grande Rise ocean ridge and Brazil’s waters.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)