Save Chocolate! Fight Climate Change
Climate Change Could Pinch the World’s Chocolate Supply; A hotter, drier climate will limit the areas where cocoa can be produced in West Africa.
Aleszu Bajak, April 14, 2016 (UnDark)
“A hotter, drier climate could squeeze the world’s supply of chocolate by limiting the areas where cocoa can be produced in West African countries like Ivory Coast and Ghana, according to [Vulnerability to climate change of cocoa in West Africa] from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). For a region that harvests 70 percent of the world’s cocoa beans, the crop’s vulnerability to climate change is becoming an ever more bitter truth…[P]arts of the West African cocoa belt, which extends from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, are in danger of becoming savanna by 2050 due to a combination of higher temperatures and increased periods of drought…[The researchers] recommend that farmers select cocoa varieties that are drought, temperature and disease-tolerant, while intensifying cocoa production where it currently occurs and expanding new cocoa production into land that has already been deforested…” click here for more