Country: Ghana

Ghana

The Flourishing Landscapes Programme

The Flourishing Landscapes Programme (FLP) addresses the triple challenge of livelihoods, climate change, and biodiversity loss at tropical forest frontiers. It will develop novel landscape-scale transdisciplinary research, via a new network of scientists and practitioners, to investigate strategies to both biodiversity and the climate resilience of smallholder farmers. By investigating agroforestry and community-led reforestation as nature-based solutions (NbS), the FLP addresses key knowledge gaps regarding the role of biodiversity in maximising nature’s contributions to people (NCPs) in agricultural landscapes. Building on this, via a human-centred design approach applied in Ghana, Ecuador and Viet Nam in coffee and cocoa production landscapes, the FLP will co-design, with rural communities, a citizen-led biodiversity monitoring toolkit to empower communities to utilise adaptive management to harness NCPs in their production. To showcase the value of the research data sets and citizen-science approaches, we will lead a co-design process with farmers, value chain actors and the insurance industry to explore risk sharing mechanisms that incentivise value chain investments in nature.

Target landscapes

The FLP focuses on landscapes with agricultural land-use dominated, to varying extents by, by coffee or cocoa production. In particular, we will focus on agricultural-forest matrix landscapes in three biodiversity hotspots: 1) Napa Province, Ecuador (the Tropical Andes hotspot), 2) Ashanti Region, Ghana, (Guinean Forests of West Africa) and 3) Central Highlands, Viet Nam (Indo-Burma). These landscapes represent forest-frontier areas where agricultural production, particularly cocoa (Ghana and Ecuador) and coffee cultivation (Viet Nam), intersects with severe fragmentation of natural forests.

Consortium and stakeholders

The Flourishing Landscapes Programme is driven by a novel global consortium of research, civil society and industry collaborators. We are motivated by a shared desire to deliver transformative change in the food system, by enhancing smallholder farmer climate resilience through the scaling of biodiversity’s benefits across topical agricultural landscapes. The consortium was built on the backbone of several longer-term collaborations between the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Tay Nguyen University and PanNature. The FLP brings together a consortium of research (Oxford, KNUST, TNU, Universidad Regional Amazónica Ikiam), finance (WTW), technology (NatureMetrics), NGO (PanNature, WWF) and community (YAKUM).

Funding

The Flourishing Landscapes Programme (FLP) is one of thirteen recipients of the first round of research grants awarded by the Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate (GCBC) – a UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) research and development programme that funds research to unlock the potential of nature to provide climate solutions and improve livelihoods. It is funded by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs working in partnership with DAI Global as the Fund Manager Lead and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew as the Strategic Science Lead. Learn more about GCBC and this grant.

Cocoa plantations are associated with deforestation in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana

Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the world’s largest producers of cocoa, account for two thirds of the global cocoa production. In both countries, cocoa is the primary perennial crop, providing income to almost two million farmers. Yet precise maps of the area planted with cocoa are missing, hindering accurate quantification of expansion in protected areas, production and yields and limiting information available for improved sustainability governance. Here we combine cocoa plantation data with publicly available satellite imagery in a deep learning framework and create high-resolution maps of cocoa plantations for both countries, validated in situ. Our results suggest that cocoa cultivation is an underlying driver of over 37% of forest loss in protected areas in Côte d’Ivoire and over 13% in Ghana, and that official reports substantially underestimate the planted area (up to 40% in Ghana). These maps serve as a crucial building block to advance our understanding of conservation and economic development in cocoa-producing regions.

HARP Project: Facilitating Sustainable Reforestation in Tropical Agricultural Landscapes – The High Agricultural Reforestation Potential (HARP) Toolkit

This project asks how can practitioner and scientific information be better integrated to enhance the sustainability of agroforestry transitions in smallholder production landscapes? Focussing on Ghana and Vietnam, to address this question we use transdisciplinary, human-centred design, remote sensing, on-farm biophysical measurements, socio-economic household surveys, and semi-structured interviews. HARP will be a set of tools designed to facilitate sustainable agroforestry-based reforestation in tropical agricultural landscapes, with a particular focus on cocoa and coffee producing landscapes at forest frontiers.

Socio-economic outcomes of ecological infrastructure investments

Ecological infrastructure refers to naturally functioning ecosystems that deliver valuable services to people, such as filtered water and disaster risk reduction. With natural resources becoming scarcer, there is a growing interest in reinvesting in naturally functioning ecosystems in the form of ecological infrastructure, with the assumption that ecological infrastructure complements engineered infrastructure. In many low- and middle-income countries, ecological infrastructure interventions are seen as a key strategy to simultaneously alleviate poverty and improve ecosystem functioning. However, the socio-economic outcomes of ecological infrastructure investments remain poorly documented. We address this knowledge gap by synthesizing research (n = 53 cases) that analyses how ecological infrastructure investments affect ten different socio-economic dimensions, such as income and food security in low- and middle-income countries. We find that ecological infrastructure investments primarily lead to positive outcomes for short-term income and natural capital, whereas positive outcomes for other socio-economic dimensions are less frequently observed. Cases with a high degree of participant involvement in the early implementation of ecological infrastructure investments are significantly more likely to capture positive outcomes across a variety of socio-economic dimensions. Analogously, cases spanning multiple methods – rather than adopting either a qualitative or a quantitative approach – report positive outcomes across more dimensions.

Linking agricultural adaptation strategies, food security and vulnerability: evidence from West Africa

Adaptation strategies to reduce smallholder farmers’ vulnerability to climate variability and seasonality are needed given the frequency of extreme weather events predicted to increase during the next decades in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in West Africa. We explored the linkages between selected agricultural adaptation strategies (crop diversity, soil and water conservation, trees on farm, small ruminants, improved crop varieties, fertilizers), food security, farm household characteristics and farm productivity in three contrasting agro-ecological sites in West Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana and Senegal). Differences in land area per capita and land productivity largely explained the variation in food security across sites. Based on land size and market orientation, four household types were distinguished (subsistence, diversified, extensive, intensified), with contrasting levels of food security and agricultural adaptation strategies. Income increased steadily with land size, and both income and land productivity increased with degree of market orientation. The adoption of agricultural adaptation strategies was widespread, although the intensity of practice varied across household types. Adaptation strategies improve the food security status of some households, but not all. Some strategies had a significant positive impact on land productivity, while others reduced vulnerability resulting in a more stable cash flow throughout the year. Our results show that for different household types, different adaptation strategies may be ‘climate-smart’. The typology developed in this study gives a good entry point to analyse which practices should be targeted to which type of smallholder farmers, and quantifies the effect of adaptation options on household food security. Subsequently, it will be crucial to empower farmers to access, test and modify these adaptation options, if they were to achieve higher levels of food security.

Ecosystem-Based Approaches Toward a Resilient Society in Harmony with Nature

Ecosystem-based approaches have proven effective and efficient in reducing disaster risks while ensuring continued benefits to people from ecosystem services. In this article, a new concept of Ecosystem-based Disaster Risk Reduction (Eco-DRR) for enhancing social-ecological resilience is proposed, based on analysis of several case studies. Field studies in developing countries such as Ghana and Myanmar have shown the benefits of Eco-DRR as implemented by local communities. These projects improve local livelihoods and social-ecological resilience. In Japan, after the massive damage from the 11 March 2011, Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, ecosystem-based approaches were an important element of the national government’s DRR efforts. Analysis of these cases shows that Eco-DRR is a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable tool for DRR that creates new value for a region. It also shows the importance of multi-stakeholder participation in the process of promoting Eco-DRR. It is likely to become even more important in the future, as a means for addressing the increase in disasters resulting from climate and ecosystem change as well as demographic change. The contribution of Eco-DRR to maintaining and restoring ecosystems is particularly valuable for countries where there is reduced capacity for land management, as currently occurring in Japan due to rapid population decline and aging.

Sustain-Cocoa: Sustainable sourcing policies for biodiversity protection, climate mitigation, and improved livelihoods in the cocoa sector

The conversion and degradation of tropical forests have multiple negative socio- environmental impacts. Conversely, their restoration, including enhancing tree cover on already cleared farmland, is a powerful nature-based solution to climate mitigation and adaptation, with potentially large biodiversity and rural livelihood co-benefits. A major driver of forest loss and degradation in the tropics is the production and trade of food commodities and associated land management practices, with cocoa being the leading forest-risk commodity in West Africa. Yet, cocoa production in agroforestry systems harbours the potential to partially restore biodiversity in key hotspots. Acknowledging these challenges and opportunities, ending deforestation and encouraging agroforestry has become a high priority in cocoa supply chains as part of interventions such as the Cocoa and Forests Initiative.

Main objectives

In the proposed research SUSTAIN-COCOA aims to investigate the conditions under which supply chain sustainability initiatives (SSIs) can lead to reduced deforestation and increased shade-tree cover in cocoa production systems and, in turn, a triple-win of increased biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and livelihood resilience. To meet this aim, six sub-objectives are integrated:

  • Developpe and synthesise datasets of cocoa supply chains, SSI attributes and coverage, and current extent of cocoa agroforestry;
  • Quantify the impacts of shade-tree cover on farm-level biodiversity, carbon storage, food production, farm and household income, and climate resilience;
  • Identify the drivers and impacts of SSIs on shade-tree cover, deforestation, and biodiversity in cocoa producing landscapes;
  • Estimate the potential carbon and biodiversity benefits of shade-tree adoption at regional scales;
  • Assess the overlap between SSI benefits and company motivations for adoption;
  • Deliver recommendations for how to improve the design, uptake, and implementation of SSIs in cocoa producing landscapes to promote biodiversity, climate, and livelihood synergies.

Main activities

To achieve these objectives, SUSTAIN-COCOA integrates (agro)-ecological fieldwork in cocoa agroecosystems, household and supply chain interviews, supply chain and land cover mapping, regional modeling, and stakeholder workshops. The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and transnational approach will provide insights into the on-the-ground impacts of existing SSIs in the cocoa sector and the potential impacts of scaling up SSIs to reduce deforestation and enhance shade-tree cover. Furthermore, the role that agroforestry can play in helping deliver multiple sustainability objectives will be clarified: protecting biodiversity, climate mitigation, and improved farmer livelihoods.