ASSESSING DEFORESTATION AND CLIMATE

When biting into a crunchy caramel-filled chocolate candy or savoring the warm aroma from a steaming mug of hot chocolate, many chocolate lovers don’t know where the ingredients or the cocoa come from, nor the costs that their production can bring on nature and the climate. West Africa produces 75% of the world’s cocoa, with Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana producing the lion’s share. In the last 60 years, these two African countries have lost around 94% and 80% of their forests, respectively, with approximately one-third of that forest loss to make way for growing cocoa.

Many of the remaining tropical forests under threat in these two countries are within legally protected areas, provide critical habitat to endangered species like chimpanzees, and contain vast stores of carbon, which, if released, could exacerbate global climate change exacerbate local climate vulnerabilities. Companies representing 85% of global cocoa usage and the governments of Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Colombia, and Cameroon have committed to ending cocoa-driven deforestation through the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI) in furtherance of their earlier New York Declaration and Amsterdam Declarations. The CFI can be a credible pathway to ending deforestation in West Africa origins, but it has many inherent fundamental weaknesses which need to be remedied. A version 2.0 consisting of renewed company actions was announced in February 2023. CFI strengthens existing efforts through certification to address deforestation. Furthermore, the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has passed and comes into force in 2024, putting a higher obligation on companies to end all deforestation in their supply chains. This category of the Chocolate Scorecard focuses on the efforts to end deforestation in cocoa production.

As such, this theme also focuses on the industry’s contribution to global annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions leading to severe climate change. The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) stresses that the industry needs to halve its GHG emissions, at a minimum, if we want to give the planet a chance at sticking to the 1.5°C global temperature rise prediction. Most emissions in chocolate companies come from category one of their scope three emissions, which requires actions to address deforestation and land use change in their supply chains. Setting ambitious climate targets, therefore, compliments overall company efforts to reduce carbon emissions to improve the resilience of farmers. 

In grading the deforestation and climate change category, we drew on expert scorers who have worked on deforestation and climate - Philip Rothrock, an environment specialist at Satelligence. Grading was done separately by the scorers, followed by a scorers discussion of their scoring to ensure consistency and validity as a means to improve the reliability of the scoring. Further details of the scoring are provided in the methodology. Also, the wild card section of this theme allowed companies to provide additional information about innovative projects, actions, or policies to address deforestation and meet climate commitments that were not covered in the questionnaire.