Coffee farmers in Costa Rica and Guatemala are weighing how many shade trees to keep on their land, balancing crop yields against climate resilience and environmental health. This matters because coffee production faces a double bind: farmers need higher yields to stay profitable, but intensifying production—by removing shade trees and increasing fertiliser use—can degrade soil, water, and biodiversity. At the same time, climate change and volatile markets threaten long-term productivity. The research fills a gap by systematically comparing the trade-offs between intensification and sustainability across different coffee agroforestry systems, from near-monoculture to forest-like farms. If successful, the project will produce a practical trade-off model that integrates productivity, environmental footprint, and economic sensitivity under varying climate and market conditions. This could help farmers, supply chain managers, and policymakers identify which production strategies best sustain livelihoods while meeting environmental goals—such as carbon sequestration, water quality, and biodiversity—that underpin the coffee supply chain and broader ecosystem services. The findings may also inform land-use decisions about whether to concentrate production on smaller areas (land-sparing) or spread it more sustainably across larger landscapes (land-sharing).
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Demand for increasing agricultural production, from existing land area, requires the intensification of production. At the same time there is a need for increased sustainability, both in terms of sustaining crop productivity under conditions of climate and market variation, and maintaining ecosystem services to humanity in general. Agroforestry systems have been posed as a way to combine productive land-use with environmental sustainability. Coffee agri-systems vary from intensive monoculture plantations to forest-like coffee agroforests and thus provide a model system to evaluate the trade-offs and potential synergies between intensification and sustainability. Coffee agri-systems will be compared in two countries in Central America, Costa Rica where production has been more intensive even within agroforestry systems and Guatemala where traditional coffee agroforestry systems predominate. A long-term coffee agroforestry experiment was established in Costa Rica in 2000 comparing different agroforestry shade trees and coffee monoculture under different levels of agronomic inputs. Provisioning, supporting and indicators of regulating ecosystem services will be evaluated in this experiment and on 60-80 coffee farms in each country representing different typologies of coffee production. The typologies will cover a range of intensity of production (levels of fertilizer use) and sustainability (levels of shade trees). This will evaluate the capacity of each system to provide supporting services (light, nutrients and water) to sustain production and a coffee agroforestry model will estimate regulating services of greenhouse gas sequestration or emissions, and water balance and quality. The coffee agroforestry model will also generate estimates of the response of the different agri-systems to varying levels of inputs and climate conditions. These will be compared to farmer reported effects of climate and market variations and used to inform an economic sensitivity analysis of each production typology. Environmental footprints in terms of carbon, water and biodiversity will be calculated and assessed against those that would be provided by forest. These will then enable an analysis of economic and environmental trade-offs of "land-sharing" (more sustainable but lower productivity larger land area) and "land-sparing" (high productivity lower sustainability but release of land to forest) scenarios. Ultimately a Trade-off Model will be applied that integrates productive, environmental, social and economic data to assess the likely adoption of different agri-systems across a population of farmers under different market and climate conditions, and the economic and environmental outcomes. These results will inform the best strategies and support for farmers to enable sustainable productive livelihoods while meeting the product demands of markets and environmental demands of society.
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