Deforestation of tropical rainforests is a significant issue in Ghana, the second largest producer of the world’s cocoa supply, the main ingredient in chocolate. Ghana lost 9.3% of the humid primary forest between 2002 and 2020. Ghana’s cocoa production belt serves as the main high forest repository of the country. Key drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in Ghana have been found to be agriculture, which includes cocoa farming.
CFI Role
The Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI) is an active commitment made between leading cocoa-producing countries and chocolate and cocoa companies. Central to the initiative is a commitment to stop further conversion of any forestland and zero production and sourcing of cocoa from protected areas.
Monitoring and mapping are key to the initiative, which give CFI the ability to identify and map different land use categories within the landscape and building on that to provide information on forests cover change, deforestation trends and forests conversion. In addition to these, identify deforestation hotspots, analyse the impact of deforestation on the landscape and provide risk map which will guide the implementation of forests interventions.
The report
A Cocoa & Forest Initiative report reveals interventions should focus on forest cover outside protected areas and forest reserves to provide spatial data and information for the all-CFI interventions to serve as a basis to assess the performance of the intervention on the ground.
Furthermore, the study aims to identify gaps in terms of data, performance of the intervention and the appropriate remedial actions to ensure efficient use of resources under the CFI intervention which will feed into CFI monitoring and reporting starting with the 2022 annual report.
Know more about the key findings and recommendations: CFI FOREST MONITORING REPORT_V (6)