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Email PageGhana’s REDD+ Strategy (Ghana 2016) identified the expansion of cocoa and other tree crops as a key driver of forest degradation and deforestation. Ghana’s strategy is to implement large-scale subnational programs in areas defined by ecological boundaries and major commodity drivers of forest degradation and deforestation. An Emission Reductions Programme for the Cocoa Forest Mosaic Landscape (Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme) and an Emission Reductions Programme for the Shea Landscape of the Northern Savanna Woodland (Shea Savanna Woodland Programme) have been proposed. In addition to addressing commodity-crop drivers, other drivers (such as mining, illegal logging and charcoal production) will be addressed within each program in each ecological zone. The Cocoa Programme is being supported by the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), while the Shea program has been submitted to the Green Climate Fund, with program steering committees to link the project/program level with the National REDD+ Working Group.
Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Program: Support from the World Bank will materialize in a carbon finance transaction under the FCPF Carbon Fund, whereby the World Bank as the trustee of the FCPF Carbon Fund will pay for emission reductions, duly verified over five years in accordance with the Methodological Framework of the FCPF Carbon Fund and resulting from the GCFPR implementation. Proposed program components include landscape planning, support for climate-smart cocoa production to increase yields, access to finance, and legislative and policy reforms. A reference level for the program area has been defined following the national forest definition, which excludes tree crops such as cocoa but includes timber plantation species. The program reference level forms one input into the national FRL submitted to the UNFCCC. The program MRV system proposes to use high-resolution (Landsat 8) imagery to detect and report forest cover change every two years during the program period, with specific monitoring methods proposed for tracking the key drivers—fire, illegal logging and timber harvest, and fuelwood collection—and for tracking reforestation and tree survival rates. The GCFRP itself is based on a number of private-sector and civil-society-supported initiatives. For example, private-sector-led promotion of climate-smart cocoa production will aim to increase cocoa yields by providing guidelines to inform on-farm production practices and farmer engagement packages to provide access to planting materials, inputs, extension advice, finance and markets. Within the cocoa landscape, increasing shade trees is one climate-smart option. Some projects embedded in the GCFRP have investigated the potential for using carbon-market methodologies to value the carbon increment in the cocoa landscape. Irrespective of whether carbon-market methodologies are found to be sufficiently economically attractive, the private and public cocoa-promotion initiatives will need to have their own monitoring and evaluation systems to track progress.
The proposed Shea Programme includes components to improve landscape governance; shea yields and incomes; and restoration, reforestation and conservation through community-based forest management, including agroforestry. For the forest management component, the project will work with staff from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and the Forestry Commission to deliver outreach programs to support community forest committees to implement community-based actions. In the GCF concept note, mitigation benefits are proposed to be measured by accounting in relation to the national FREL/FRL, as well as accounting for enhancement of carbon stocks in the savannah ecosystem landscape. The project is still under development, but with carbon stock increments due to agroforestry excluded from the FREL/FRL, the project will clearly need to develop additional M&E systems in order to track progress and account for carbon benefits from agroforestry and community forestry that do not meet the national forest definition.
Sources: Ghana and UNDP (2017), Ghana Shea Landscape REDD+ project. FCPF (2016) Emission Reductions Program Document, Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme, published in Rosenstock et al. 2018