As part of the 4th Open Science meeting 2019 of the Global Land Program, Dr Marieke Sassen of UNEPWCMC, a partner organization of the CocoaSoils Program gave a presentation on some of UNEP-WCMC’s analysis results under the theme “Assessing current and future risk to biodiversity and ecosystem services from cocoa-driven deforestation in the cocoa zone of West Africa” to promote the work and explore potential collaborations with others working in this area. In her presentation, she discussed the spatially explicit approach that UNEP-WCMC used to help understand and visualize potential trade-offs among cocoa production and forest-related biodiversity and ecosystem services at the national scale. She explained how they characterized and mapped potential future risk to biodiversity and ecosystem services due to cocoa expansion in the West African cocoa zone. She described how they used various modelling tools to link measures of biodiversity and ecosystem services to change in land use, under different future cocoa expansion scenarios. The results showed that, depending on past impacts, there are different risks and some opportunities for biodiversity and cocoa in different countries in West Africa.
Follow this link to read her presentation.
Contribution by: Marieke Sassen
marieke.sassen@unep-wcmc.org