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You’re holding a steaming cup of coffee in your hands, the comforting warmth flowing through your fingertips. Or perhaps it’s that moment after dinner when you allow yourself a bite of rich, velvety chocolate. It’s a ritual for many of us—simple pleasures that offer comfort in a chaotic world. But behind these innocent moments of indulgence lies a story we rarely hear: a story of environmental destruction, loss, and a future at risk.
Most people don’t think twice about their morning coffee or the chocolate they savor after a long day. We buy them from shelves without ever imagining the complex journey they’ve taken to reach our hands. But if you trace the path of these everyday products back to their origins, you’ll discover a trail of consequences that leads to the heart of our planet’s most precious ecosystems: the rainforests.
How Coffee and Chocolate Fuel Environmental Destruction
Let’s start with chocolate, something we all love. To make the chocolate we enjoy, you need cocoa beans. To grow cocoa, trees must be planted. And to plant these trees, farmers need land. In the Amazon rainforest and other tropical regions, the way to get this land is often through deforestation. The snowball effect begins with demand. The global demand for chocolate is rising, expected to rise from $48 billion in 2022 to $67 billion by 2029, fueled by a growing population and our endless love for sweet treats. As more people consume chocolate, more cocoa needs to be grown.
And that means more land must be cleared. In the Amazon, where cocoa farming is expanding, this often means cutting down ancient trees and stripping away rich, biodiverse ecosystems.
But chocolate isn’t alone in its environmental toll. Coffee, the beloved beverage that gets millions of people through their day, has a similarly devastating impact. Coffee tastes like a little piece of heaven, and like cocoa, coffee grows best in tropical regions, and much of the world’s coffee comes from farms that were once pristine rainforests. Worldwide, we consume about 400 billion cups of coffee a year, with Latin America responsible for producing over 80% of coffee. To make way for these coffee farms, large swaths of forest are cleared, and with them, the animals, plants, and ecosystems that thrive there are lost.
In both cases, the snowball effect is clear: as we consume more coffee and chocolate, more land is required for cultivation. More land means more deforestation, and deforestation leads to an array of environmental problems—carbon emissions, loss of biodiversity, and the displacement of indigenous communities who rely on the forests for their livelihoods. It’s a cycle that continues to grow as our demand for these products increases.
The Hard Facts: What’s Been Lost and What We Stand to Lose
Let’s look at the numbers. Every year, it’s estimated that we lose roughly 6 million hectares of forest yearly, nearly 80% of which is caused by agricultural production. That’s equivalent to an area the size of Croatia disappearing annually to make room for crops, livestock, and plantations. The top ten global producers of coffee emitted 21 million tCO2 in 2017 as a result of deforestation linked to coffee production. Eliminating these emissions would be equivalent to removing 4.5 million cars from the road or the carbon sequestration from growing 350 million new tree seedlings for a decade.
According to the European Commission’s impact assessment, cocoa and coffee make up roughly 15% of the exclusive list of products imported by the EU from deforested land. With every hectare of forest that’s cleared, we also lose the incredible biodiversity that rainforests harbor—species of plants, animals, and insects that exist nowhere else on Earth.
These forests play a crucial role in regulating the climate, acting as giant carbon sinks, absorbing and storing carbon from the atmosphere. But as these forests get destroyed, not only is that storage capacity lost, but the carbon that was previously stored in the trees is released back into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
The harsh reality is that we’ve already lost a staggering amount of forest. Since 1990, over 420 million hectares of forest have been cleared—an area roughly the size of the European Union. And unless we change our ways, this trend will only continue. As the global population continues to grow, so does the demand for products like coffee and chocolate. It’s estimated that by 2050, the world’s population will reach nearly 10 billion, and with more people comes more consumption. If current consumption trends continue, we will lose another 170 million hectares of forest by 2050—pushing ecosystems to the brink and accelerating climate change.
The question is: how much more are we willing to lose?
The Power to Protect is in Your Hands
At Fund the Planet, we’ve seen the impact of deforestation firsthand. We travelled to the Amazon rainforest and witnessed the reality of what’s happening. Entire swaths of forest are being wiped out, leaving behind barren land where life once thrived. We spoke to local communities in places like Sarayacu, Peru, who are struggling to protect their homes and livelihoods in the face of relentless expansion. This experience is what drives our mission to protect these vital ecosystems before it’s too late. We know what’s at stake, and that’s why we do what we do.
In response, Fund The Planet was founded with a clear mission: to protect and preserve rainforests by acquiring endangered land before it can be exploited. Rather than allowing industries to exploit these areas, we purchase them with the sole purpose of preservation. We designed it in a way that, by creating many small nature reserves, people can buy and own their personal nature reserves, stewarded by the local people of the region.
Why is our approach so effective? For the average amount spent by a German on coffee monthly, which is 24.58€/month, you can protect the area that is required to produce coffee for more than 10 Germans. The demand for everyday products like coffee and chocolate will not go away. But together, we can make sure that this demand doesn’t overwhelm the planet.
The next time you reach for that cup of coffee or indulge in a piece of chocolate, remember that your choices matter. You don’t have to give up the things you love, but you can make sure the planet does not suffer for it! Your actions today will define the future.