The same AI-powered forecasting that helps large agribusinesses protect their supply chains rarely reaches the smallholder farmers who grow most of the world’s coffee — and who have the least capacity to absorb losses when extreme weather hits.

Nearly two-thirds of global coffee production comes from Latin America, where droughts, floods, heat events, and pest pressures are intensifying. Half of the land currently suitable for Arabica coffee is projected to become unviable by 2050. Yet the predictive climate intelligence that could help farmers make earlier, better decisions before damage occurs has remained out of reach for most smallholders: too technical, too expensive, and too disconnected from the cooperative structures through which farmers actually operate.

Fair Trade USA and ClimateAi are partnering with coffee cooperatives in Latin America to change that. This pilot will integrate ClimateAi’s seasonal and long-range climate forecasting into cooperative workflows, translating risk signals into localized alerts and prioritized actions delivered through trusted channels — SMS messages, agronomist trainings, and cooperative communication — and develop Climate Preparedness Scores and Adaptation Roadmaps for each cooperative, giving farmers a practical framework for acting before losses occur rather than responding after the fact.

The pilot will operate in multiple contexts so as to generate comparable evidence across different conditions. The team will work a high-capacity system that allows testing at scale and in a more vulnerable context with limited technical support — producing evidence on what it takes to make this model work where the need is greatest. By the end of the pilot, the team will publish an open-source replication playbook documenting methods, costs, and lessons learned, designed for rapid adoption by additional cooperatives. Fair Trade USA’s longer-term goal is to extend the model across its network of 800,000 farmers and into other climate-vulnerable commodities including cocoa and bananas.

CO2 Foundation is glad to support this pilot. Smallholder farmers are among the most exposed to climate volatility and the least served by the tools that exist to manage it. Building the infrastructure layer that connects predictive climate science to community-led action is exactly the kind of work that can scale.