Ghana - Cocoa deforestation embedded in trade

Years available: 2014-2024

Data last updated: 28 Jul 2025

This metric estimates how much deforestation is associated with the cocoa exports in the selected year and department. Here, deforestation was defined as the conversion from undisturbed forest to non-forest (Renier et al., 2023; Vancutsem et al., 2021). To estimate the deforestation associated with the cocoa exports in a specific year, we used a) a four-year lag between cocoa planting and the first harvest (the first year of potential cocoa exports), and b) aggregated deforestation at the location of cocoa production across 15 years. By setting these parameters we are assuming that the plantations will be ready for harvesting, and consequently starting to contribute to the volume traded, in the fourth year after the deforestation event. For example, cocoa exported in 2021 was planted in 2017 or earlier. We calculate cocoa deforestation in 2021 (Vancutsem et al., 2021) as the sum of deforestation defined by the area converted from undisturbed forest in 2002 to non-forest in 2017 at the location of the cocoa plantation (Kalischek et al., 2023).