Jeannette Gurung attended the International Coffee Conference ‘Climate and Coffee: The Heat is on!’ hosted by HIVOS on the 3rd of July. Coffee producers, civil society organizations, certifiers, financial institutions and the coffee industry gathered in Amsterdam to discuss climate change impacts in coffee producing countries and the challenges at farm level to adapt to it. The Conference highlighted the critical role that women farmers play in the production and processing of coffee, and organized a session on Gender and Coffee that brought out the specific challenges faced by women coffee farmers who often have limited access to resources and benefits, and are facing significant climate change impacts. The role of certification schemes and standards such as the W+ to mitigate these conditions was raised in the group’s efforts to identify solutions.
The key goal of the conference was to generate collective action across the coffee chain and find lasting solutions to sustainability issues in the coming years. More specifically, to address integrated solutions for climate change challenges which are green, gender sensitive, attractive to youth, scalable and financially sustainable.
All presentations including the opening speech, the Coffee Barometer 2014, the presentations of the key note speakers and the break-out sessions, the graphic illustration and photos are available here: https://hivos.org/coffee