COSA: Mission and Objectives

What is COSA?
The Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA) is a is a non-profit global consortium of institutions developing and applying an independent measurement tool to analyze the distinct social, environmental and economic impacts of any agricultural practices, particularly those associated with the implementation of specific sustainability programs.

COSA is the only non-profit, publicly accessible, and transparent system operating at the global level.

Our Mission
Our mission is to co-create, in open partnership, a common language of sustainability measures for agriculture that are widely-shared because they are widely valued.

What are COSA's Goals and Objectives?
The primary goal is to establish useful global indicators and measurement tools which farmers, policy-makers, and industry can use to understand and improve their sustainability with different crops or agricultural sectors.

COSA facilitates this by enabling them to accurately calculate the relative costs and benefits of becoming involved in any sustainability initiative.

What is COSA used for?
The COSA measurement tools analyze the social, environmental, and economic effects on producers and their communities. By providing a scientifically-based understanding of what is sustainable COSA tools serve as an effective means of:
• Determining policymaking and donor investment priorities
• Structuring and conducting the monitoring and evaluation efforts for initiatives and projects
• Managing suppliers/supply chains for firms wanting to affect their sustainability efforts or to benchmark them
• Providing producers with practical business-decision tools to assess the costs and benefits of various sustainability practices, especially those associated with the implementation of any standards or certification programs.

What are COSA's Core Activities?
• Development of a globally consistent and scientifically rigorous methodology for different crops
• Application of the methodology to secure data on tens of thousands of farms across a number of commodity producing countries.
• Development of a practical business decision-making tool for use by farmer groups.
• Building local institutional capacity with local partners to collect high-quality data on sustainability
• Partnering with the U.N.'s International Trade Centre to create a database for global dissemination of this information
• Facilitation of policy dialogue and successful investment in sustainability based on findings.

What is COSA'S Geographic & Product Focus?
The tools developed by the COSA project are applicable to a diverse range of commodity supply chains and regions globally.
• Coffee work conducted in: Colombia, Guatemala, Tanzania, Honduras, Kenya, Peru, Costa Rica, and Vietnam,.
• Cocoa: Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire
• Tea, Cotton, Palm Oil, and Soy are forthcoming.

For more information on COSA Contact:
info@sustainablecommodities.org