Measuring the carbon in your coffee: A path to carbon-neutral PNG coffee

Coffee - Whether you drink it daily, or just on those especially cold winter mornings, it’s iconic. So iconic that there are an estimated 1 billion global consumers every day.

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), coffee is the second largest agricultural export (after oil palm), employing over 2.5 million people. Smallholder farmers, meaning those with less than 5 hectares (remember 1 hectare is about the size of a rugby field), grow the largest share of coffee, over 95% in fact! These smallholders employ techniques of shading, pruning and reduced fertiliser-application to increase coffee quality and boost ecosystem health. In recent decades, PNG’s small-scale, low-input coffee systems have produced increasing amounts of organic and specialty products. So you may be wondering, what’s next?

Imagine you’re holding a morning cup of coffee in your hands. Have you ever considered where that coffee comes from, whose hands picked it, or the conditions under which it was grown? What about its carbon footprint by the time it reaches you? Some imagine a future where PNG coffee farmers engage in growing global carbon markets opportunities, selling sustainably produced carbon-neutral coffee.

Funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), my Honours project (supervised by Dr Steven Crimp from the Australian National University) sought to answer these questions. The research aimed to investigate methods of quickly and reliably measuring the on-farm carbon footprint of coffee grown in PNG’s Eastern Highlands Province.  

The research identified all carbon calculators in global circulation and prioritised those which were designed to quantify farm-level emissions from agriculture. This process left 36 calculators… but who’s counting. We then subjected the calculators to a set of exclusion criteria, filtering out ‘inappropriate’ calculators. For example, a tool designed to measure the carbon content of a cattle grazing property in Scotland probably won’t do a very good job of measuring carbon in PNG coffee systems.

With the help of PNG smallholder growers, coffee exporters, industry and government representatives, and local researchers, we attempted to capture the social, cultural, environmental and economic values that made PNG coffee unique in these exclusion criteria. This was an invaluable step to ensure the research was co-designed by those who it influences.

A huge thank you goes out to Mawe Ganapa and the field trial team, Monpi Coffee Exports, and Coffee Industry Corporation for taking the time to inform this research.

The information gathered was an interesting insight into competing priorities and helped to identify a carbon calculator that worked for as many project partners as possible. The top calculator, the Cool Farm Tool, was designed in the United Kingdom for use worldwide. Its easy-to-use online interface, proven performance in coffee, and ability to capture the subtleties in smallholder systems shows promise for use in PNG coffee.