New cocoa risk map on GFW Pro

Approximately 70% of the global supply of cocoa originates from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where production sites have replaced millions of hectares of forest. To help end cocoa-driven deforestation in this region, WRI partnered with the World Cocoa Foundation and 19 major cocoa and chocolate companies to create the Cocoa Deforestation Risk Assessment (Cocoa DRA). It provides a standardized view of cocoa-driven deforestation risk across Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and is now available as a map layer on GFW Pro.

This partnership also resulted in another valuable resource for cocoa supply chains: the West Africa Cocoa dataset (WAC), a database of 840,000 unique cocoa plots in the direct supply chains of participating companies that provides an extensive view of mapped cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. The public version of the WAC is available on GFW as a cocoa plot heat map that anonymizes data to protect the privacy of farmers. as a cocoa plot heat map that anonymizes data to protect the privacy of farmers.

For companies seeking to comply with the EUDR, both resources can help to identify high-priority landscapes and prevent deforestation before it happens, while determining where to prioritize efforts.

This project was the first of its kind in handling large quantities of smallholder farmer location data, so a thorough ethics and legal review was conducted before the project was launched.

You can learn more about the project and data resources in this blog.