Fight Climate Change With Coffee Waste

Coffee is threatened by climate change. It may also be one of the biggest opportunities to fight it.

As a coffee lover and PhD student focused on carbon dioxide removal, I was immediately intrigued when I first heard about the “Regenerative Coffee: Biochar, Climate, and Health” Action Lab. I registered instantly, and over the Winter Quarter, we were lucky to collaborate with Raina Lang, Director of Sustainable Coffee at Conservation International (CI), to develop a strategy for the scale-up of biochar within coffee supply chains.

Biochar locks away carbon in soils for many years and improves soil health, increasing yields. So with my interdisciplinary team– Charulata who works on policy, Emma who studies design and Shubhankhar who’s getting his MBA– we focused on the question, “Why doesn’t it scale?”

Through systems mapping and stakeholder interviews, it became apparent that there is significant tension about what the best implementation models of biochar actually look like. David Griswold, Founder of ClimateB2C, put it best: “People’s reaction to biochar just seems to be confusion.” Biochar is not primarily associated with carbon removal, soil benefits, or improved livelihoods, but just confusion.

The barrier is not a lack of interest or disagreement about the science. It is a lack of clarity and confidence in how biochar can lead to successful outcomes in different contexts. This has created a waiting game between stakeholders– each wondering who will make the first move. To address this, we recommended CI build a Biochar Decision Playbook that systematically reduces uncertainty.

We identified that building a successful biochar project is just like brewing a good cup of coffee. It takes the perfect blend of biomass sourcing, pyrolysis technology, financing and offtake, the right verification platform, and an attractive farmer incentive model. Our suggestion is for CI to embed these variables in a financial model to predict real-world outcomes. If stakeholders can see projected outcomes before committing, making the first move becomes less risky.

It was great to share our final insights with John Buchanan, Deputy Director of the Center for Regenerative Economies at CI. In a delightfully unexpected conversation, we also spoke with Google X, who expressed interest in helping build the underlying database for our playbook. The project keeps opening doors we did not expect.

The icing on the cake was the opportunity to share our research findings on a panel at SF Climate Week 2026. In conversation with Devorah Freudiger, Director of Coffee Culture at Equator Coffees, we demystified carbon removal and made the case for coffee’s unique role in scaling biochar as a climate solution.

Coffee is projected to lose up to half of its viable growing land, while demand continues to rise. At the same time, scalable carbon removal is no longer optional to meet climate goals. But biochar will not scale on its own. It will take clearer decision-making tools, aligned incentives, and the willingness of stakeholders across the value chain to move first. The opportunity is here. The question is: who is willing to brew the first cup?

Developing a biochar project is like brewing a good cup of coffee. It takes the perfect blend of biomass sourcing, pyrolysis technology, financing and offtake, the right verification platform, and an attractive farmer incentive model.

Our panel “Coffee, Carbon Removal, and Co-Benefits: Transforming Coffee Waste Into Biochar to Help the Coffee Industry Face Climate Risk” at SF Climate Week 2026 brought together coffee producers, roasters, and consumers at the Equator SOMA Cafe in San Francisco. The panel was moderated by David Griswold, Founder of Climate B2C, and our student team was joined by Devorah Freudiger, Director of Coffee Culture at Equator Coffees.

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