Scaling pathways for a climate smart cocoa sector

Climate change has been projected to change the geography of cocoa production unless production practices are adapted to novel conditions. Climate exposure mapping contributes to a better understanding of where, when and to what degree climate shifts will impact production and allows us to identify more resilient practices. However this information on its own does not lead to wide spread adoption. Scaling climate smart practices is therefore a priority to secure long term sustainability of the sector. Because cocoa production is a multi-decadal investment and many efficient measures to mitigate risk require a long lead time adaptive action should be taken now to avoid production losses from an incrementally changing climate. We argue that a multi-stakeholder approach will be required as no single technology or scaling pathway may account for the diversity of decision environments of the actors involved. Prioritization of climate change adaptation is challenged by the heterogeneity of projected hazards across space, high uncertainty of data to guide ex-ante decision making and a lack of tried and tested off the shelf approaches to deliver relevant information to cocoa practitioners. Making the cocoa sector climate smart will therefore need to link climate science as it develops with stakeholders along the supply chain, develop novel approaches to incentivize innovative climate risk management strategies, and build capacity within the sector to confront climate change at scale. We discuss the advantages and limits of four possible scaling pathways for climate smart cocoa. Voluntary certification, impact investing, private sector training, and policy guidance were considered. We classified these pathways by actors’ incentives to prioritize long term viability over short term gains, flexibility to react to novel information, the number of farmers reached and the efficacy of action. Information was collected through a series of individual stakeholder interviews and workshops across the important cocoa origins of West Africa and Latin America and along the value chain. We find that no single pathway checks all preconditions for efficient scaling in isolation. Certifiers and incentive investors with their smaller constituencies were found to be more likely to base decisions on novel information and may act as catalysts to develop no-regret approaches that may be more acceptable for private and public actors. We therefore suggest a platform approach to scaling in which each actor embraces climate smart practices depending on their preferences and collaborates with other actors while incorporating novel information in an iterative fashion.