PAN-CAFÉ

The PAN-CAFÉ project seeks to bolster the resilience of Costa Rica's coffee production systems by advocating for improved coffee varieties, establishing a data collection and evaluation framework, and enhancing information sharing through Artificial Intelligence.

The initiative aims to develop a shared tool that provides producers across Costa Rica's eight biogeographic regions with refined climatological prediction models, uncoded information on local coffee varieties, their genetics and resistances, and an AI-powered advisory module that uses all of these data sources to provide recommendations to enhance the resilience of their coffee farms and the sector as a whole, thereby promoting economic and social stability.

This project is led by the Institute for Agricultural, Fisheries and Food Research (ILVO), in partnership with VITO and the National University of Costa Rica (UNA), and it is supported by the Flanders International Climate Action Programme (FICAP).

In this project, VITO’s Climate Impacts team is central in several activities that leverage climate intelligence to enhance the resilience of the coffee sector:

• Expanding CLIMTAG to Costa Rica: with the support of Costa Rica’s National Meteorological Institute (IMN), VITO is expanding CLIMTAG to Costa Rica, providing downscaled and bias-corrected agri-climate indicators for the whole country through the free-access platform. This aims to not only support the country’s coffee producers, who will have free access to past and future climate information for their region or plot, but also the agricultural sector as a whole, enabling a comprehensive understanding of climate change’s potential impacts on this climate-sensitive and socio-economically relevant sector. The tool’s indicators are further tailored to the country’s requirements through a series of stakeholder workshops.
   
• Generation of crop suitability indicators for coffee varieties: tailored crop suitability indices and maps allow agricultural stakeholders to spatially analyze the climatic adequacy of a given crop to a certain location and climate scenario, to identify future climate threats, opportunities and potential adaptation measures. Within PAN-CAFÉ, VITO develops suitability maps that mirror the impacts of increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns in the spatial distribution of coffee varieties. Particularly, arabica coffee is becoming less suitable in lower altitude plots, pressuring growers to plant at higher altitudes, often conflicting with protected mountain areas. It is crucial to understand what climate variables drive such land use pressures and what adapted coffee varieties and traits breeders should target to mitigate this effect.
   
• Stakeholder engagement and capacity building on shared meteorological and agricultural knowledge: in March 2026, VITO and UNA coordinated a stakeholder engagement workshop in Costa Rica, joining researchers, service providers, government and private sector agents, such as from IMN, IICA, ITCR, and UCR, that work within the climate-agriculture nexus. The three-day workshop promoted insights into the national and regional climate R&D scenes, knowledge exchange on joint use cases of relevant climate and agricultural datasets and information technologies, such as CLIMTAG and others, for agroclimatic resilience, and the identification of barriers and solutions to the development of more robust agri-climatic services.