Community-Based Monitoring and Assurance System for Regenerative Agriculture
Planadas, Tolima, Colombia
Community-based innovation for tracking and verifying farms' sustainability performance
Funders
Tinker Foundation
Partners
Fundación Natura
Coffee
Crops or productive systems
Implementation dates
July 2023 - December 2024
Beneficiaries
Coffee farmers from four villages and two coffee associations
About the project
This project seeks to design, prototype, and test an innovative community-based monitoring and assurance system with coffee growing communities in Planadas, Colombia, as an alternative and complementary system to third-party certification that will empower local communities to track and verify farm and landscape performance, as well as democratize data so that communities can use it to make decisions on equitable and sustainable land use that restores, preserves and enhances biodiversity, improves livelihoods and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. This system has the potential to enhance biodiversity-based practices, tools, and approaches of entire supply regions, offer credible assurances to businesses for key commodities, and provide an evidence-base that will drive new investments in support of a global move towards sustainability for small producers and rural communities.
Outcomes
Anticipated short-term outcomes are: 1) improved capacity for four coffee farming communities to efficiently monitor, collect, and analyze performance data to inform decision-making in the landscape; 2) a 'go-to-market' strategy to support the adoption of a community-based monitoring system; and 3) a consolidated understanding of community-based monitoring and assurance systems and how they can support shared outcomes and claims. The long-term outcomes are that communities in all coffee-growing municipalities in Tolima have the capacity to monitor, collect and communicate shared performance outcomes at the landscape level, and that agribusinesses will have enhanced due diligence ability to make claims about regenerative agriculture that are relevant and proportional to actions taken in the landscape.