Rainforest Alliance
Current donation: $50,000
Donations to date: $210,000
The Rainforest Alliance (RA) works with farmers and forest communities in over 70 countries to protect forests and biodiversity, take action on climate change, and promote the rights and livelihoods of rural people. Our donations help the Rainforest Alliance expand their climate-smart agriculture work in Ghana, which allows farmers to adapt and prepare for the impacts of climate change.
Why They're Climate Smart
Climate change disproportionately affects the world's most vulnerable people — especially those in rural farm communities. This is notably true in Ghana, where cocoa is a vital commodity cash crop that provides livelihoods to over a million households. However, unsustainable cocoa production is a key driver of deforestation in Ghana and causes close to half of the forest loss in Ghana's high forest zone. The result is an unbalanced ecosystem with more erosion, heavier rains, longer droughts, and lower crop yields.
RA works to conserve Ghana's forest landscape and support agricultural livelihoods of local farmers by providing them with skills and resources necessary to sustainably produce cocoa and an incentive to manage their shade trees (in Ghana, the government owns the trees so farmers have no real motivation to care for them). Properly managed shade trees act as a carbon sink, improve soil conditions, restore tree cover, create a suitable habitat for wildlife, and improve the cocoa yield — resulting in crops and land that are more resilient, higher incomes, and food security.
Why They Receive Our Continued Support
Over the last four years, RA has enabled communities to implement climate-smart practices that improve soil conditions, establish 19 tree nurseries, produce 430,000 seedlings, restore 6 hectares of degraded land, develop GPS technology that monitors tree survival rates and changes in land use/cover, and conduct 36 training classes for 4,000 farmers. Our donation will allow RA to expand into new communities in the Bibiani-Anhwiaso-Bekwai district and continue to incentivize hardworking farmers, create nurseries, grow and register more trees, conduct more trainings, and transition accountability to local Landscape Management Boards — who are responsible for ensuring climate-smart agriculture practices are followed and illegal deforestation is tracked.