A brief ceremony was organized by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources (MLNR) in collaboration with the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI) secretariat in Accra on 4 July 2019 to formally hand over land-use maps to CFI signatory companies, who were represented at the ceremony by the World Cocoa Foundation. The event was organized to showcase this achievement of a critical CFI milestone. Over the past months, the CFI secretariat and the CFI Mapping Taskforce had been working closely with the Forestry Commission’s Resource Management Support Center (RMSC) to ensure these maps are updated and shared with signatories.
The delivery of these maps, a key commitment under the CFI Joint Framework for Action, will help companies in their journey towards a deforestation-free supply chain and, particularly, in refining their CFI action plans.
During the event, Mr. Musah Abu Juam, Technical Director of MLNR, expressed his gratitude to all stakeholders that worked to reach this milestone and congratulated the RMSC for their efforts in making this a reality. Mr. Mohammed Yakubu, Head of Mapping Unit of the RMSC and chairperson of the CFI Mapping Taskforce, also presented the state of the Ghana forests using historical land-use maps from 1990, 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2018 to help visualize the forest loss and, in some cases, forest gains in some areas (e.g. the Northern sector of the country). The presentation on forest condition scores given to each forest reserve also triggered worthy discussions on the relevance of this assessment, a point that will be further researched by the MLNR in the coming months.