Deforestation Monitoring of Smallholder Cocoa Farms with Google Earth Engine

Challenge Background

Tropical forests play a crucial role in tackling climate change, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring ecosystem services hence helping in the achievement of agricultural sustainability. There is therefore the need to perform a deforestation risk assessment of all smallholder cocoa farms with regard to international certification standards in order to help these farmers get support in terms of premiums to increase their income.

The Problem

Deforestation and land degradation has been on the ascendency for the past 10 years which is affecting cocoa productivity, a major economic cash crop in Ghana and also the environment as a whole due to activities of artisanal small scale miners and also expansion of farm lands by farmers.

Goal of the Project

• Determine land areas inside smallholder farmers affected by deforestation since 2014 percentage of farmlands affected by deforestation.
• Suggest the number of shade trees to be planted for restoration efforts.
• Determine the amount of carbon emissions caused by the deforestation. 

Project Timeline

What you'll learn

Google earth engine, JavaScript and python, remote sensing