Increasingly, cocoa stakeholders recognize the need to plan for and act on climate change to mitigate supply, reputation and quality risk and realize their sustainability targets.
This website is designed to give you access to resources you need to understand climate-related risks of cocoa production and to guide you to action on the ground in one place.
Basics
What is Climate Smart Cocoa?
How is CC affecting cocoa?
Company engagement in CSA
Why invest in Climate Smart Cocoa?
What role can you play?
How are different organizations taking action?
Take action
What are entry points for effective interventions?
Develop a CSC Plan
How can I assess risks?
What is Climate-smart cocoa?
Climate-Smart Cocoa (CSC) is the adaptation of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices to the management of Theobroma Cacao (cocoa). CSC rests on the same three pillars that support CSA; namely, productivity, adaptation, and mitigation.
The productivity pillar seeks to optimize yields and quality in relation to the inputs needed. In other words, the ratio of the value of production and the cost of inputs increases (output-input ratio). Higher farm profitability should lead to a decent income that ensures food security, higher wages, and investment capacity.
Adaptation embodies the need for long-term resilience to climate change, as well as farmer capacity to minimize short-term risks and prevent long-term stresses.
Finally, wherever possible, CSC ties in the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions to the previous objectives, helping to reduce the contribution of cocoa to climate change.
The CSC program works alongside a number of programs, such as the UTZ Sector Partnerships program and the Cocoa and Forests Initiative to attain the aforementioned objectives.
More on climate-smart agriculture and climate-smart cocoa
How is CC affecting cocoa?
The exposure of cocoa producing regions to extreme climatic events is expected to increase as climate change progresses. Prolonged dry periods and flooding are expected to be the leading determinants of crop productivity and farmer food security.
However, increasing mean temperatures, erratic precipitation, disruption of seasonal patterns, and droughts are also among the potential climate related stressors.
Climate change will also affect companion species in agroforestry systems and, perhaps more importantly, cocoa pollinators, pests, and diseases.
As part of the CSC approach, farmers should have the tools and capacity to reduce the impact of potential hazards, supplement incomes during lean periods, and resume production, if possible, with adequate CSC practices after extreme climatic events.
Read about extreme climate events
Why invest?
Farmers in cocoa producing countries are among the most vulnerable segments of the population. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, farmers’ incomes generally fall below the $2/day poverty line set by the World Bank making food security a very real concern for smallholder households. For many organizations this is reason enough to invest in climate resilience. But increasingly profit oriented companies also make CSC a core part of their charitable and brand building activities.
In sustainability and emissions reductions programs CSC can be a key component. Concerns about reliable access to the desired quality and quantity of cocoa to secure efficient operations are also being voiced. Investments in CSC can improve the reliability of supplies and reduce risks to operations.
What role can your organization play?
Different actors have different opportunities to engage or invest in climate-smart agriculture based on their role in the supply chain, including through on-farm practices to help farmers adapt to climate variability, on-farm and off-farm strategies that help supply chain actors adapt to current and future climate threats, and enablers that help to establish the conditions needed to implement CSA.
The ways in which the cocoa sector supports farmers to build resilience to climate change and/or engage in efforts to mitigate climate change can have significant impact on the ability for farmers to make a living, the security of supply of smallholder crops, and the reputation of cocoa sector actors drawing loyalty of end consumers and investors.
CSA helps address a number of important challenges such as the relationship between agriculture and food security, poverty, and climate change. The practices, strategies and enablers that cocoa stakeholders have at their disposal depends largely on their role in value chain as well as the projected climate impacts of their sourcing areas.
For example, those providing direct services to farmers have more leverage and motivation to encourage practices at the farm level, collaborators who share responsibility for service provision are better able to implement broader strategies on and off-farm, and catalysts sparking action in the sector at a high level with a light touch on-the-ground are best positioned to build and support the conditions to help supply chains adapt to climate change.
How are different organizations taking action?
As interest in CSC grows, the number of projects to build resilience increases. The following list are case studies, but is by no means representative. Neither does it endorse projects over others. It is simply meant to illustrate practical examples.
Rainforest Alliance
The Rainforest Alliance has created, in collaboration with the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), science-based training materials tailored to the climate risks of specific cocoa-growing regions. The practices included in the manual have been drawn from the experience of cocoa farmers in each climate zone of Ghana, from experts and stakeholders in the Ghanaian cocoa sector, and from scientific experts. “Climate-smart agriculture is not a one-size-fits-all approach—a farmer dealing with increasing floods, for example, will employ different practices from one facing water shortages,” said Martin Noponen, the Rainforest Alliance climate director.
These new materials help farmers better prioritize and tailor various practices for their particular locations. Noponen added that the new materials are available to anyone online, making them potent tools for scaling up transformation in cocoa-growing landscapes around the world.
Hersheys + Farmerline
CocoaLink is a mobile app that aims to inspire, train, and incentivize the next generation of Ghanaian cocoa farmers through gamified and interactive content in a variety of digital media such as video, pictures, interactive quizzes, and map visualisations. In partnership with Hershey and the World Cocoa Foundation, Farmerline conducted a pilot of CocoaLink in 2017 with 800 young farmers. The goals of the pilot included improving the certification efficiency and sustainability of cocoa supply chains and increasing access to information for young farmers. This effort ultimately contributed to increased farmer incomes and improved agricultural productivity for Ghana. The platform has built a community of over 2000 young users in just about a year of being launched. Additionally, Cocoalink serves as a unique avenue for young people in Ghana to learn about cocoa farming and see firsthand how involvement in agriculture can be a profitable and respectable career. Through CIAT’s collaboration with CocoaLink, the Cocoa Zones section was created as one of the key features of the application. The Cocoa Zones is an interactive map created with cocoa production data gathered from the consortium’s CSA project pilot in Ghana. The map breaks down the main cocoa growing areas into five Climate Change Impact Zones and informs users about the characteristics of each zone. Users are able to know the current climate conditions, the impact of climate change and the adaptation measures to take at farm level in each zone.
Root capital (coffee)
Starting in 2015, Root Capital began to work with a number of long-term clients who could help pilot Digital Business Intelligence (DBI) services. In 2018, we turned to Quezaltenango, Guatemala and the Manos Campesinas coffee cooperative. A longtime lending and advisory client of Root Capital, Manos Campesinas had the internal controls necessary to take on this ambitious project, as well as a marked determination to innovate on behalf of its 1,200 farmer members who fight climate change on a daily basis.
Root Capital paired leading climate analysis from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) with the cooperative’s own digital maps of farmer locations. In real time, they were able to show tailored risk assessments of the predicted impact of climate change on cooperative members. With limited time and resources, the cooperative can now direct climate adaptation services to the farmers who need it most. Most recently, we trained cooperative employees on how to use farm-level data to create tailored fertilization plans for farmers. These plans will help members maintain coffee quality and yields in the face of volatile temperatures and extreme weather.
Entry points
Climate-smart cocoa actions can be started from multiple entry points. We’ve divided them in 3 areas: practices, system approaches and enabling environments for climate-smart cocoa.
Climate-Smart Cocoa recommends a series of agricultural practices that have been found to fulfill one or more of the key objectives of CSC.
As is typically the case with agricultural interventions, the expected results of these practices are context-specific, and they are interlinked with other traditional farm management and CSC practices.
While these entry points refer to the farm-level, natural-resource management should also be considered at the landscape level In addition to the recommended technologies and practices for implementation at the individual farm level, CSC considers the broader levels of landscapes, ecosystems, and value chains.
At all stages, the key objectives remain increasing productivity and adaptation while mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
Beyond the farm level, analysis can focus on the achievement of synergies, estimation of trade-offs, and cost-benefit analyses. By taking a comprehensive stance on the pursuit of objectives, a CSC approach can help determine which practices and actions are most efficient and relevant for stakeholders.
The enabling environment for climate-smart cocoa constitutes a set of framework conditions that encourage the adoption of climate-smart practices. This framework is composed of a variety of tools, incentives, and policies, including institutional arrangements, advisory services, gender aspects, stakeholder involvement, etc. Changes in the enabling environment can reorient current practices toward climate-smart cocoa in a sustainable an efficient way. It promotes institutional capacity and facilitates access and risk-reduction to the adoption of new technologies and practices.
Multi-step Approach
Climate Smart Cocoa requires by definition a more nuanced approach to determining what constitutes a “good” agriculture practice by accounting for site- and time-specific variability such as climate, vulnerability and capacities of producers to identify and adopt climate smart responses when needed. Traditional guidance such as national sustainability curriculums and GAP manuals may be insufficiently tailored to local variability, particularly under conditions of future climate uncertainty and volatility.
We propose a framework to prioritize CSC options that is rigorous yet flexible and sufficiently lean to be applied by value chain actors in a relatively short amount of time with limited resources and resulting in an evidence-based action plan. The framework consists of a spatial risk scan, prioritization of responses, and identification of barriers to response adoption.
First comes an assessment of cocoa specific climatic changes and potential impacts. hen, a participatory approach with stakeholders at different stages of the value chain is taken to evaluate which practices most likely to lead to the desired results. Scaling out practices may become a possibility, especially through coupling CSC practices with business incentives (e.g. certification).
Check out our risk asessment tool
How can I assess risks?
Our risk assessment tool can help you to develop an initial assessment of cocoa specific climatic changes. We provide some key data that provides a quantitative backdrop to the participatory development of locally adapted CSC interventions.
Step 1) Global agro-climatic zones for cocoa production
Globally, cocoa is produced agro-climatic zones that have important differences in their climatic characteristics. Interventions to address risks in one zone may be useful within the same zone, but scaling beyond the agro-climatic zone should be evaluated with care.
Step 2) Future distribution of agro-climatic zones for cocoa
How will this context change in the future? We developed a most likely future scenario for the distribution of the agro-climatic zones for cocoa. Some regions may stay similar, while others may face profound changes.
Step 3) Degree of change
To define a top-level strategy it can be useful to make the degree of change explicit. Regions that may become unsuitable for cocoa will need a different intervention strategy than regions where the agro-climatic zone remains unchanged.
Step 4) Observed trends in cocoa regions
Climate change may already be manifest in observed climatic trends. Global climate models agree about changes in temperature but may disagree about precipitation. In such cases it may be helpful to understand more about the observed changes of the climate over the last 30 years.
Step 5) Current and future climate graph
Gives you the ability to download a climate graph for a global grid cell of interest. It shows the historic distribution of precipitation and also shows the modeled future projections.
Step 6) Avoid deforestation
Do no harm is the key principle for climate smart cocoa. Cocoa driven deforestation should be avoided to mitigate future climate change. Land use conversion driven by smallholders is a major GHG source and a big liability in the carbon footprint of cocoa production.
SEE Indicators
Social resilience
Economic resilience
Environmental resilience
Measure Progress
Land use change
Forest cover + biodiversity
Production: Human well-being