Together with local and international experts and under consultation of various stakeholders, GCP has been working on alignment and standardization of coffee sustainability indicators since 2017. This year two pilot trials will be rolled out in Vietnam to enhance data collection for sustainability performance measurement through cross-commodity indicators.
As one of the key outcomes of GCP’s work on facilitating sustainability measurement, the Coffee Data Standard has been published in 2019 and is being used at different levels. Continuing the work on harmonizing approaches to measurement in innovative ways, the Delta Project brings together Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC), International Coffee Organization (ICO) and GCP on streamlining sustainability performance measurement across commodities aiming at a sustainability performance framework that is adaptable to other commodities as well.
In the current phase of the Delta Project, GCP will begin piloting these common cross-commodity indicators in the field in Di Linh, Lam Dong Province, Vietnam during the next days. Together with local experts from the Community Development Center of Buon Ma Thuot and 200 smallholder coffee producers, the pilot will seek to cross-check credibility and reliability of the data collected, but to also gain insights on conditions for coffee production such as soil nutrition. Furthermore, this data will be utilized as a mean to build feedback mechanisms with valuable insights for farmer’s production planning, which will be road-tested later this year.
The combination of indicators across the three dimensions of social, environmental and economic factors will result in valuable information useful to not only extension services, trade and NGOs in order to enhance support for sustainability improvements at farm level, but will also help other actors of the value chain to quantify their Sustainable Development Goal commitments and gain crucial insights for policy decisions.
Meanwhile the Delta Project, funded by ISEAL Innovations Fund, is also advancing on digitalizing the framework and building guidance material for its implementation into existing technical environments like monitoring and evaluation systems. This includes standardized descriptions of data as well as unified metrics in the form of a schema for the Delta Framework indicators, providing guidance on data sources and helping to add value to collected data for various use cases.
The Delta Sustainability Framework holds a set of 15 farm-level, outcome/impact indicators across the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability, complementing existing standards, initiatives and schemes. The Delta Project indicators were developed in consultation, and by assessing 200 metrics currently used in cotton and coffee sustainability reporting. GCP’s Coffee Data Standard played an important role in developing these indicators.
The field pilot is set to launch in early March, with first results expected by beginning of May.
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The ISEAL Innovations Fund is supported by the following partners:
