Until recently, the Ivorian government’s forestry agency SODEFOR has faced challenges monitoring forest areas such as Cavally for encroachment.
Their challenge lay in the way cocoa is grown, with cocoa-driven deforestation being difficult to spot from the air. Farmers clear the forest floor to plant their cocoa, which in its infancy requires the shade of the taller trees that make up the forest canopy. It is only when the crops grow and they require more sunlight that larger trees are felled, at which time it is too late to stop deforestation as it has already happened. We partnered up with SODEFOR to find a solution.