At SPROGO we believe we must take care of our environment and the people that support the coffee industry. It would be impossible for us to make a great product and ship it to you with no carbon footprint. So, we have teamed up with GoldStandard.org to support a project that offsets the entire carbon footprint of SPROGO. SPROGO is a Carbon Neutral company! Not only are we officially carbon neutral, but the project directly supports the coffee industry.
Go Climate Positive!
We all have a role to play in the fight against climate change. Our actions,
however small, can have a profound impact when combined with thousands of others wanting to make a difference.
Fairtrade Project: Cookstoves for coffee farmers in Ethiopia
Deforestation and climate change are threatening the coffee sector in Ethiopia. Coffee is extremely sensitive to rising temperatures. An increase of just one degree already results in a loss of quality of the coffee beans, two degrees means a loss of productivity and at three degrees the coffee plant has difficulty surviving. If current trends continue, coffee could become a scarce commodity in the coming decades.
Small-scale farmers are particularly hit hard. Rapid deforestation in Ethiopia is leading to increasing drought. Coffee farmers (often women) that depend on the income that their land generates and are financially unable to bear the consequences of the changing climate.
In this project, nearly 20,000 households are benefitting from a more efficient cookstove, the Tikikil, for general use and a Mirt, for a flat round bread made of teff flour (Injera) to bake. The Tikikil replaces the much-used traditional way of cooking on an open fire. The participating households own the cookstoves and pay for these stoves partly in cash and partly with the CO2 credits that the use yields.
Cooking with the Tikikil and Mirt reduces the use of wood and CO2 emissions by 40%.
There is less smoke in the house and more time savings for women who need to collect less wood and can cook faster. In addition, coffee farmers are made more resistant to the consequences of climate change through the implementation of a Climate Academy. The academy promotes, among other things, Sustainable Agricultural Land Mechanisms (SALMS), such as promoting shade trees to protect the coffee plants from too much sun.