Water Sustainability Through Voluntary Certification

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 aims to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. A central strategy to implement this goal is to influence corporate conduct along global supply chains through voluntary certification programs. Coffee has been among the first products to be certified, for example, in Columbia and Ethiopia. A cup of coffee costs about 140 liters of water. The major volume of this water is needed to grow the coffee plant and comes from rainwater. However, the small fraction used in wet processing is blue water (abstracted from surface and ground water), which is sometimes scarcely available. Moreover, the wastewater generated in the wet production process is often heavily polluted. This paper analyzes the expansion of certification programs in the coffee sector with regard to their potential to contribute to greater water sustainability. Adapting a framework developed by Kemper and Partzsch (2019), we analyze and compare six major third-party certification programs for coffee: Bird Friendly, Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C), EU Organic, Fair Trade (FLO), Fair for Life (FFL), and Rainforest Alliance/UTZ. The framework includes two criteria (four indicators) in the social dimension and four criteria (five indicators) within the environmental dimension. It allows us to code and assess the six certification standards. In addition, we conduct expert interviews and field visits at two certified cooperatives in Columbia and Ethiopia, to better understand how standards are applied in practice. How do certification programs acknowledge water challenges? Do they have the potential to influence corporate conduct and to contribute to SDG6?