Ghana - Cocoa deforestation

Years available: 2014-2024

Data last updated: 28 Jul 2025

Cocoa deforestation is the amount of deforestation within a 15-year allocation period that is converted to cocoa plantations. To calculate it, we overlapped the cocoa area map from Kalischek et al. (2023) (representing cocoa plantations in 2019 to 2021) with the annual loss of undisturbed Tropical Moist Forests from the EC JRC Tropical Moist Forest dataset (2025), applying a four-year lag between deforestation and first potential harvest to reflect the time from planting to harvest. Note that this does not account for cocoa expansion after 2021, and values for the most recent 2 years may change in the future when new versions of the Tropical Moist Forest dataset are released, updated to reflect whether recent forest change shows temporary degradation or permanent deforestation.