Resilience is about ensuring that coffee and those who depend on it can continue to thrive in a changing world. Climate change, increasing weather extremes, and growing uncertainty are reshaping how coffee is produced and traded, affecting both producers and businesses across the value chain. Building resilience requires more than responding to today’s challenges—it means anticipating tomorrow’s risks and strengthening the capacity to adapt over time.
Because these risks vary across origins, production systems, and supply chains, NKG’s approach is rooted in understanding where vulnerabilities exist and what measures can have the greatest long-term impact. This includes improving our understanding of climate risks while supporting farming systems that are better equipped to cope with changing conditions and remain economically viable. For us at NKG, resilience is not about eliminating uncertainty, but about making informed decisions, investing in adaptation, and creating the conditions for coffee to remain a viable livelihood for generations to come. The commitments below show how we translate this approach into concrete action and measurable progress.
Climate Risk & Adaptation
Climate change is reshaping coffee production, but its impacts differ significantly across origins, landscapes, and supply chains. Understanding where the greatest vulnerabilities and opportunities for action lie is therefore the foundation for building effective resilience. Our approach to climate-related risks and scenario analysis follows a progressive, location-specific methodology that combines qualitative risk identification with targeted quantitative assessments.
At NKG, we conducted initial qualitative climate risk assessments as part of the development of our Climate Action Plan. These assessments identified and classified key physical and transition risks across our main coffee-producing locations, considering both our own operations and our upstream and downstream value chains. The resulting risk categories were subsequently validated through our Double Materiality Assessment, confirming their relevance from both impact and financial risk perspectives. Given the structure of our business, climate-related risks are primarily concentrated in the upstream value chain, which is therefore the focus of our further analysis, engagement, and action.
These climate risk assessments – now further evolved, incl. analyzing different long-term coffee suitability dimensions and short-term weather data – serve as the starting point for developing supply chain-specific adaptation pathways. Developed by our field teams and agronomists with support from global expertise, these pathways translate climate insights into practical plans tailored to local realities. They define which measures should be prioritized to strengthen immediate resilience, build structural resilience over time, and enable transformative adaptation where required. They also outline how actions will be implemented, with whom we will collaborate, and along which timelines progress will be pursued.
Moving from assessment to implementation, we are using these insights to guide targeted actions across our operations and value chain. Our approach is built around a clear understanding of where climate risks occur, where we have direct influence, and where progress depends on collaboration with producers, suppliers, and other partners. By connecting risk assessment with concrete adaptation planning and action, we aim to strengthen the long-term viability of coffee production in a changing climate.
Regenerative Agriculture
Looking across NKG origins and partnership programs, one thing becomes clear: many of the practices that are now discussed under the term regenerative agriculture have long been part of good agricultural practices across our operations. For us, regenerative agriculture is not about adopting a new buzzword, but about building on existing knowledge and experience while evolving the way we think about agricultural systems. It means looking beyond individual practices and understanding how they interact within a broader impact logic — combining sustainable intensification with the principles of agroecology to strengthen productivity, farm viability, ecosystem health, and resilience. It also means complementing established approaches with innovation where needed to address new challenges and unlock greater impact. The range, scale, and depth of actions already taking place across NKG provide a strong foundation to build on. With our Sustainability Strategy, we are bringing these experiences together into a more structured approach that supports scaling what works, strengthening knowledge exchange, and creating lasting impact while remaining rooted in local realities.
On-the-ground action is already ongoing across a wide range of settings. In 2025, we completed a company-wide stocktaking of those activities to establish a baseline for NKG’s biodiversity and ecosystem actions across origins and our 19 partnership programs that focus on regenerative agriculture. The results in terms of range, scale and depth of actions amazed us.
Through a framework of policy commitment and technical guidance we doubled down on our commitment to promote regenerative agriculture, systematized knowledge and prioritized interventions that are in line with NKG’s philosophy and operational strengths. Globally, we provide resources that NKG field teams can use to design, assess, and implement actions on the ground. Equally, the framework provides guidance for structured monitoring and the evaluation of those actions and creates a common structure for knowledge exchange across our diverse origins and operations.
Making Regenerative Agriculture last – Our implementation principles
The Regenerative Agriculture framework was developed through in-depth interaction among and with our field teams and practitioners across origins, while also addressing the material IROs from the DMA.
The framework takes up the four pillars of Regenerative Agriculture as defined by the Global Coffee Platform — Biodiversity, Soil, Water, and Resilient Livelihoods — reflecting our commitment to aligning ourselves with recognized industry frameworks rather than operating in isolation. Under each pillar, we define our priority actions and interventions, together with practical guidelines for how field teams and farming partners should approach implementation. This structure ensures that the policy functions not only as a statement of intent, but as a genuinely operational tool that connects strategic ambition directly to farm-level practice across NKG’s origins.
