Coffee Farmers Become Climate Heroes — Acorn Agroforestry Carbon Programme (Cauca, Colombia)

'Coffee Farmers Become Climate Heroes' is a Solidaridad-led programme, funded in part by the German Postcode Lottery and delivered on Rabobank's Acorn carbon platform, that pays smallholder coffee growers in Colombia's Cauca department for carbon sequestered by planting shade and medicinal trees alongside their coffee. The scheme uses the Plan Vivo-certified Acorn Agroforestry Methodology, with tree growth measured by satellite imagery and machine-learning algorithms; carbon certificates are issued ex-post, once sequestration is actually detected, rather than projected in advance.

In the village of La Sierra, roughly two hours from Popayán, around 1,200 smallholders take part.

A documented example is farmer Diego Edison López, who together with his wife converted part of a 3-hectare farm (1 ha coffee, 2 ha protected woodland) and was credited with 26 tonnes of CO2 sequestered, receiving a payment of US$520 in autumn 2023 — a rate above the programme's minimum guaranteed floor of €20/tonne, with market sales elsewhere in the programme reaching €31/tonne. Of certificate revenue, 80% goes directly to producers, 10% to the Acorn platform and 10% to Solidaridad for programme delivery; Microsoft is among the corporate buyers of the resulting credits. Regional productivity on participating farms is reported to have risen 15-20% over three years as shade trees improved soil and microclimate conditions.

As with the parallel Peru cohort, first payments only arrive around three years after planting, once trees are reliably satellite-detectable, and reported outcomes such as the Diego López example are illustrative case data rather than a full independent audit of the entire Cauca cohort; average regional sequestration is reported at 4-6 tonnes per hectare, with this farm's yield notably higher.