Historic: Cocoa Industry Gets First GHG Accounting Standard

New Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Accounting Standard Released for Cocoa Industry

The World Cocoa Foundation has partnered with environmental sustainability consulting firm Quantis to introduce a new standard in greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting that will help improve the measurement and reporting of emissions across the cocoa industry. The new standards address changes in land use; carbon removals; and indirect, often more challenging to measure, Scope 3 emissions.

One of the significant issues in the cocoa industry, however, was a lack of consistency as far as methodologies regarding how companies have reported and quantified their own environmental impacts went. That created a big hurdle in enabling meaningful comparison on an emissions-data base across the whole sector so important for any sort of reductions into the carbon footprint of the sector's cocoa. This means that the cocoa companies will be reporting their emissions in a far more transparent and comparable manner so that the area for improvement could easily be noticed.

The cocoa industry is characterized with issues with tracking of so many peculiar developments since the cocoa farm, more than often, embraces so many aspects of land-use change, such as deforestation, which are part of massive emissions of greenhouse gases. The large cocoa companies mainly source from a multitude of suppliers, making it quite challenging to accurately track their emissions. Such inconsistency in reporting forms one of the main challenges that hindered proper and comprehensive analysis of the sector's environmental footprint.

A unified framework to the new standard for accounting on GHGs being offered by WCF and Quantis is able to conquer those challenges by most companies. Clear guidelines about measurement of land use change emission and tracking of carbon removal as well as standardizing reporting of indirect emissions are hard to measure; such data must fit the reporting line of the emission data against global reporting standards, and these standards include the GHG protocol, the science-based targets initiative by SBTi.

This development comes at a time when the cocoa sector is increasingly under pressure to meet more stringent environmental regulations and take more responsibility for its climate impact. The new standard will help cocoa companies comply with changing regulations while offering farmers the chance to benefit from carbon projects intended to reduce emissions and improve sustainability.

From that standpoint, it will be understandable on the part of the WCF and Quantis to see that this standardization can serve as an avenue of easier trackability and subsequent decrease in industry-wide GHG emissions within a common approach to the reporting of emission sectors. This is part of the overall effort made by WCF to make cocoa production sustainable; among such other initiatives is the Deforestation Risk Assessment Methodology and Cocoa Household Income Study to deal with some environmental and social issues related to cocoa farming.

This new standard for GHG accounting also nudges the cocoa industry to become more transparent. Standardized emissions reporting will now be made possible, which will help the companies gain a clearer picture of their impacts on the environment and, accordingly, take concrete actions toward their reduction. More transparency in such efforts will help consumers, investors, and other stakeholders measure the sustainability work of the companies involved in the cocoa sector.

This would allow companies producing cocoa to become more directly involved in lessening climate influence through assisting companies to measure their emissions and diminish them. The companies can aid by using guidelines from the proposed rule to better assist in a global effort for reducing climate changes.

Conclusion:This step would be important for a more sustainable cocoa sector and keeping it productive in response to ever-increasing demand for more environmentally responsible practices. Because cocoa production itself is hampered by the challenges caused by climate change and deforestation, this new standard of GHG accounting offers very clear and practical elements for companies to use in measuring and reporting reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. With this standardized approach, the cocoa industry can meaningfully act to reduce its footprint on the planet and, simultaneously, on communities involved in its production. For the first time, with the support of WCF and Quantis, the cocoa companies will have an open hands-on framework for their sustainability journey and contribute toward a more climate-conscious future.

Source: World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), Quantis