Towards greater sensitivity: advancing social life cycle assessment for the coffee sector in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Purpose: Literature on coffee sustainability focuses on environmental and economic challenges and often falls short on social factors that strongly influence overall sustainability. For coffee producers, social aspects are existentially important, while environmental concerns take lower priority. Recognizing that social aspects are critical to sustainable development, we assessed the social impacts of nine coffee case studies in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Methods: Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) has gained interest and importance to better understand and measure the positive and negative social impacts of products on various stakeholders. However, many challenges in its applicability still exist. Therefore, in this study, we operationalized and applied the S-LCA methodology for the coffee sector, based on the UNEP guidelines and the ISO standard 14,075. We used the reference scale approach based only on primary, site-specific data and systematically involved different actors at the upstream stages of the coffee value chain to capture multiple perspectives. In total, we conducted 170 inventory interviews and included six validation interviews. Results: We found significant differences in social performance both within and across the two countries; cross-country differences are reported to contrast the two contexts rather than to rank performance. The differences we found within the two countries show that not only context but also organization matters. Especially in Brazil, the cooperative models scored higher than the commercial plantations. In the Brazilian case studies, mean performance scores were highest for the stakeholder category 'farmer', followed by 'local community', 'worker', and 'value chain actors'. In the Congolese case studies, mean performance scores were highest for the stakeholder category 'local community', followed by 'farmer', 'worker', and 'value chain actors'. The impact subcategories showing the lowest social performance scores, such as 'fair salary', 'livelihood and well-being', and 'productivity', are the ones that were ranked highest during the validation interviews. We found that workers mostly do not earn living wages, with only seven exceptions in Brazil and one in the DRC. Conclusions: This study contributes to the limited body of S-LCA research on coffee production, and, to our knowledge, is among the first to be based on primary data collected in Brazil and the DRC. It presents a novel approach for achieving greater case sensitivity in S-LCA through primary data and context-specific reference scales, going beyond generic databases. This approach makes it possible to account for differences among case studies within the same country and sector. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-026-02760-8.