Grantee Profile

Nature Conservation Research Centre

Suman Sureshbabu

Life without chocolate. 

If only that were the worst possible consequence of what is happening in Ghana today with cocoa, the country’s largest cash crop. Chocolate companies across the globe depend on Ghana, the world’s second largest cocoa producer. Yet the land growing cocoa trees in this country is becoming depleted of soil nutrients and cocoa farms are being abandoned, jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions of residents. So Nature Conservation Research Centre (NCRC), with Rockefeller Foundation support, is exploring carbon finance, a novel method of addressing these challenges in Ghana.

Founded in 1996, NCRC has rapidly become the country’s leading indigenous conservation organization. It has been collaborating with rural communities, traditional leadership, local institutions and farmers to highlight the opportunities carbon finance—also a weapon against climate change—offers for a more sustainable cocoa sector.

How could carbon finance benefit Ghana?  First, let’s take a look at the country’s cocoa production, most of which is in the hands of smallholder farmers. Since they have the fewest resources, these farmers must sometimes resort to unsustainable practices for their incomes. To feed their families, many employ farming practices that give quick returns, such as cutting the shade trees that help maintain soil quality and clearing additional forest land to plant their cocoa trees under full sunlight.

The problem is, while full-sun trees may produce more cocoa early on, without shade trees the quality of the soil deteriorates. These farms, soon no longer productive at all, are abandoned and farmers plant elsewhere. The deforestation from encroaching on new land leads to soil erosion and degraded water quality in streams.

Enter carbon finance, a new tool that merges nature and the marketplace.

Through photosynthesis, growing trees remove carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere and turn it into wood. So the more shade and forest trees farmers maintain, the more fruitful and long-lasting their cocoa trees are and the less carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere to adversely affect the environment. 

Through carbon finance, private companies around the world “offset” their additions to greenhouse gases by purchasing credits to emit them. The companies can buy these credits from farmers who grow their cocoa under shade trees and don’t clear forests. NCRC is working with farmers’ organizations to promote carbon-capturing cocoa production and working with cocoa purchasing companies to secure a premium price for these farmers. Thus, farmers are paid to adopt sustainable agricultural and forest conservation practices. This improves the longevity and productivity of cocoa farms, enhancing both livelihoods and local economies while helping to combat climate change.