Keeping an Eye on Cocoa: Satellite Monitoring Provides Key Support on No Deforestation Commitments

Ever wonder where the chocolate in your candy bar came from? With 70 percent of the world’s cocoa produced by Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, chances are your midnight snack started out as a seed pod growing on a cocoa farm in West Africa.

West Africa is also home to the Upper Guinean rainforest, and like many other tropical areas where commodities compete with the environment for land, these forests have been threatened by the growth of the cocoa industry. Between 1988 and 2007 it is estimated that nearly 2.3 million hectares of the Upper Guinean rainforest were cleared to make way for cocoa farms. However, in 2017 the cocoa sector followed the example of commodities such as palm oil and soy in committing to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains through the launch of the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI).

The CFI is led by the World Cocoa Foundation, IDH the Sustainable Trade Initiative and The Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit. This initiative covers an estimated 80 percent of global cocoa usage and represents a pledge by both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire as well as key cocoa and chocolate companies, to end deforestation and forest degradation from cocoa on any forested land. Specific areas to be protected, including national parks, are laid out within the Frameworks for Action for both countries.

While this commitment is an impressive first step, it is only half the battle. In order to manage deforestation, CFI signatories must be able to detect where cocoa farms are expanding into forested lands so they can take appropriate mitigation measures. As part of the agreement, signatories committed to transparent satellite-based monitoring systems and publicly disclosed reports on progress towards their commitment to halt deforestation.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) has coordinated closely with the initiative to provide support on defining the needs of these monitoring systems, including datasets able to differentiate areas of cocoa production from natural forest and datasets which delineate the boundaries of national parks amongst other ecologically important areas. In addition to relevant datasets, a successful monitoring system needs a platform that can analyze and visualize this data to determine whether progress and key outcomes are being achieved. Such monitoring platforms are necessary at both the national scale to enable monitoring by governments, and supply chain scale for monitoring by companies.