Yabo-Abbe and Bossemate Cocoa Landscape Platform

Côte d'Ivoire has lost a significant proportion of its forest cover, falling to 2.97 million hectares by 2021, with agricultural activities and encroachments acting as significant drivers. The Yapo-Abbé classified forest and the Bossématié nature reserve covers an area of 985,000 ha, and is noted for its diversity of flora and fauna. Yapo-Abbé classified forest, a peri-urban forest around 30 km from Abidjan, is also rich in wildlife and biodiversity. It is known to be one of the forests that helps to regulate the greenhouse effect in the Abidjan district. 

Despite the ecological value of these and similar landscapes, deforestation rates are expected to double, with government ambition to increase commodity production and population growth at over 2.7% per year. Along with these factors come an expected increased demand for land, food, fuelwood and charcoal, and building materials. This may lead to related pressures of shifting cultivation, mining concessionaries and community encroachments, poaching, illegal logging, and wildlife trade.

This enabling condition (EC) seeks to build on P4F's lessons on setting up collective action platforms in the Tai landscape in Cote d’Ivoire, and a cocoa landscape restoration platform in Asutifi Asunafo in Ghana. This project aims to replicate P4F's successes in new and additional priority landscapes in Yapo-Abbe & Bossemate landscapes in Cote d'Ivoire.

The project aims to design a landscape collective action platform to reduce threats to forests through a participatory and inclusive approach, using lessons from successful collective action platforms. It will sensitise private companies on legislative requirements for forest restoration and conservation, which will in the long term protect forests and restore degraded areas in the landscape.

The project will facilitate the consensus and adoption of shared principles among stakeholders, promoting sustainable commodity production and the conservation of forested areas within the northwest landscape. A series of knowledge-sharing events will be organised, culminating in the signing of conservation agreements (MoUs) to safeguard more than 500,000 hectares of tropical forest.

The platform will provide an enabling environment where stakeholders can jointly develop an investment case ensuring that there is an investment plan to mobilize funding for landscape interventions and investments for land use.

The project will design a collective action platform for pre-competitive collaboration and engagement among key stakeholders and private companies with a clear business case for collective action and investments into the landscapes, which will ultimately improve incomes and livelihoods of farmers and communities.