Brazil accounts for over 40% of the global Arabica coffee volume. Such a significant portion of the world crop means that Brazil’s crop each year defines the global market.

Catastrophic frosts in the last 50 years, the most recent in 2022, have destroyed roughly half of the country's coffee trees, leaving its wildlife and the world's coffee industry vulnerable.

And by 2030, Brazil could have lost 11 million hectares of agricultural land due to climate change.

Sombra - 'shade' in Portugese - is being delivered by Assembly in collaboration with our sister brand Volcano Coffee Works, our green coffee partner - Mió, and the Federal Institute of Espírito Santo. It aims to showcase how Brazil's ubiquitous monocrop, full-sun farming system - proven to decimate wildlife, degrade soil diversity and provide coffee plants with no protection from extreme weather events - can be reconfigured to harness the power of agroforestry.

Over five years, we're funding the reforesting of 60,000 coffee trees and non-coffee trees across a 15-hectare plot of Mió's land. In doing so, we'll create a sustainable and integrated management system of different plant species to protect the area from extreme weather conditions, recover soil health and native species diversity, and improve yield from the area at harvest.

The selection of the trees to be used was driven by two considerations:

Reviewing the list of potential species, it was decided that the mix would be cedar, macadamia and guapuruvu.

Sombra will prove that agroforestry land management systems can help to mitigate the threat to the coffee industry of a rapidly warming climate, improve production yields for producers, enable native wildlife to prosper alongside large-scale farming activities, and pave the way for a more sustainable future for Brazil’s coffee industry.