What is the Project Objective?
With this project we want to help accelerate the adoption of and the commercial benefits from regenerative organic tea farming practices in the tea sector by working with smallholders, cooperatives and family run farms. This project forms part of the 2024 Strategic Projects for Tea Rebellion.
Why
We believe that the tea sector is behind in adopting such practices while others (coffee or cocoa) are already more advanced. In particular smallholders are struggling with existing bureaucratic requirements of practices associated with organic, fair, rainforest alliance and other certifications. The rate of innovation in agronomic practices seems to have slowed while focus on compliance has increased. In addition the systematic measurement of current baselines for carbon, nature and other metrics as well as the measurement of the impact of new practice adoption also appears lagging. This low evidence base is a challenge for becoming carbon and nature positive as an industry challenge for story telling and voluntary carbon payments as well as for (sometime in the future) regenerative organic certification.
What
We want to bring relative actors together to create a cross industry “practice sharing and innovation support” which will entail:
- Educating and sharing the What - the recommended practices - while iterating and adding with farmers actual experience
- Developing methods/ approaches to capture baseline climate and nature/ biodiversity in particular for the tea sector
- Documenting baseline measurement for carbon and nature/biodiversity on farms
- Supporting farmers to connect with one another to share lessons learnt on regenerative tea farming
- Looping in climate and nature measurement third party specialists to ensure what and how we measure holds up to scrutiny
- Looping in the finance sector in particular sustainability/green/startup providers interested in making voluntary carbon and nature payments happen
- Connecting with public finance agencies who might be interested in funding this project
- Looping in the wider tea value chain (Retailers, packers, ESTA, consumers)
When?
We are right at the start of this project. We are now opening this up for cross industry input and collaboration. We can see three stages.
- Scoping & Refinement - in public space as off now (October 18 2024).
- Partner “Contracting” & setting up Project Governance & Deliverables. The project will require Implementing partners (tea farmers, tea industry bodies, tea experts), Knowledge partners (measurement, data experts, voluntary carbon schemes), Finance Partners (Providing funding and experience with voluntary credits)
- Pilot, iterate, implement - we will follow an iterative learning and measurement based approach as set out in this visual.
Note: Fundraising for project and measurement finance should run in parallel to all three stages.
We invite you to comment below and/or on the live google version of this blog.