As climate change reshapes coffee and cocoa landscapes worldwide, access to robust, location-specific climate intelligence is becoming essential for long-term farm management decision making. To meet this need, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT developed ACLIMATAR — a science-based platform that translates complex climate projections into actionable insights for perennial crops such as coffee, cocoa, and tea.
Building on this foundation, the Alliance partnered with World Coffee Research to co-develop CafeClima, a tailored application that integrates ACLIMATAR projections with multi-location variety trial data. The tool enables users to explore how coffee varieties perform today across trial sites climatically similar to their location of interest, while visualizing how temperature, precipitation, and climate hazards are expected to evolve in the future, as well as the list of most climatically similar trial sites. By linking varietal performance with projected agro-climatic shifts, CafeClima supports more informed, climate-resilient planting and breeding decisions.
This collaboration highlights ACLIMATAR’s value as reusable infrastructure. Rather than starting from scratch, partners can leverage rigorously validated climate datasets — including hazard indicators, agro-climatic zone dynamics, and impact gradients — and translate them into decision-support tools tailored to their sector needs. For World Coffee Research, the scientific credibility and spatial detail of ACLIMATAR provided a trusted backbone for developing a forward-looking resource for breeders, researchers, and industry stakeholders.
“The integration of robust climate projections with our global variety trial data opens new possibilities for guiding coffee sector adaptation. Tools like CafeClima help translate science into practical insights for strategic decision-making.”
Beyond coffee, the approach demonstrates how organizations can harness ACLIMATAR data to create customized applications that bridge climate science and operational choices — from crop breeding and sourcing strategies to landscape planning and investment prioritization.
Interested in collaborating?
Organizations interested in developing climate-smart tools can collaborate with Christian Bunn or his team at the Alliance ( Alliance-ACLIMATAR@cgiar.org ) to adapt ACLIMATAR datasets into tailored decision-support applications aligned with their crops, geographies, and strategic goals.
By combining ACLIMATAR’s scientifically robust projections with proprietary or field data, partners can accelerate the creation of next-generation climate services that enable resilient agricultural systems.
For further overview of the different services and tools Christian Bunn and his team offer, take also a look at the Innovation Toolbox