Airbus Defence and Space has been selected as the technical partner for the Coffee Canopy Partnership, led by JDE Peet’s to create the world’s first comprehensive open map of coffee plantations using high-resolution satellite imagery. The initiative targets deforestation-free supply chains, starting with a 1.2 million km² pilot across East Africa including Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda.
This partnership leverages Airbus’s Pléiades satellites at 50 cm resolution and Pléiades Neo at 30 cm, combined with AI models for precise identification and monitoring of plantations. It addresses critical gaps in mapping data, where shade-grown and agroforestry coffee systems have been misclassified as natural forest, hindering accurate deforestation tracking.
The mapping will produce definitive datasets on coffee farms and forest loss, enabling risk identification, reforestation, and support for smallholder farmers’ livelihoods. JDE Peet’s prior work with Enveritas mapped 90% of global coffee forests and 1.8 million plots in Vietnam, revealing minimal post-2020 deforestation and leading to MOUs with seven governments for remediation.
Five countries—Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda—are now technically deforestation-free for coffee post-2020. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization provides methodological guidance, using the 2020 coffee map to refine global forest data by excluding agroforestry lands.
Plans aim for worldwide coverage of all coffee-growing regions by 2027 through industry co-investment. This enhances supply chain transparency, regulatory compliance like the EU Deforestation Regulation, and farmer resilience against poverty-driven deforestation.