Climate off-farm rippled impacts on wellbeing and behavioral resilience: cocoa value-added chains in West Africa

Climate change has direct impacts on farming.

These impacts ripple off-farm to also affect the wellbeing of non-farming individuals and families whose livelihoods depend on harvested yields and their co-products.

With drought as an expression of a changing climate and cocoa value-added chains as a mechanism linking ecological and social systems, our interdisciplinary team of experts from Ghana, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Sweden will apply mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to: (1) assess rippled off-farm impacts of drought on individuals along local value-added chains whose wellbeing is highly dependent on cocoa harvests; (2) identify behavioral adaptations to buffer the impacts of past and expected future drought by actors along value chains; (3) determine socially-acceptable interventions that can enhance off-farm climate resiliency.

This 3-year project has critical poverty and gender dimensions in how even minor climate disruptions can have acute wellbeing effects on women and landless individuals engaged in domestic cocoa processing and local trading. New knowledge will shed light on climate adaptive mechanisms among some of the most vulnerable groups in society.

We will recommend socially-acceptable policies that could strengthen drought resiliency of relevance to the larger Global South.