A smallholder cocoa-agroforestry removals programme integrating ~100 shade trees per hectare into existing cocoa and rubber farms across ~10,941 hectares of Côte d’Ivoire’s Bas Sassandra District, developed under Verra VCS and removing approximately 11,900 tonnes of CO₂ every year.
Full-sun cocoa is losing ground to soil degradation and climate stress shade trees are the proven fix, but the farmers who need them most cannot afford to plant them.
Côte d’ivoire is the world’s largest cocoa producer, and the San-Pédro, Nawa and Gbôklé regions sit at the heart of its Cocoa belt. Decades of full-sun and very-low-shade monoculture have left ageing orchards yielding around 350 kg/ha per year, with declining soil fertility, rising heat stress and increasingly irregular rainfall. Diversified shade trees restore
Microclimate and soil, add timber, fruit and non-timber income, and buffer the crop against climate shocks yet participating farmers, most living on less than USD 1 a day, cannot self-finance seedlings, planting and the years of maintenance that establishment requires.
Carbon finance closes that gap. By converting measured tree growth into verified removals, the project funds a decentralised nursery network, remunerated planting and maintenance work, and farmer field-school training across UIREC’s 25 member cooperatives with no land-use change and no removal of existing vegetation. For cocoa and chocolate buyers facing EUDR traceability and scope 3 targets, it offers removals rooted in the very landscapes they source from.
Row-planted shade trees fraké, framiré, akpi and companion species established across several thousand smallholder parcels of 3–5 hectares, measured against matched control plots under VM0047’s area-based approach.
Removals are quantified from above- and below-ground biomass of planted trees against a performance benchmark established through matched control plots, net of a preliminary 22% non-permanence buffer. Monitoring combines permanent sample plots, full parcel-level GIS and drone/Sentinel-2 remote sensing making every tonne traceable to a mapped parcel. Figures are pre-validation estimates from the draft Project Description (August 2026) and will be confirmed at validation.
The project is seeking forward offtake interest against its first 20-year crediting period. Early commitments fund the nursery network and the four-to-five-year planting window where they deliver the most impact, and secure volume from a scarce, fully mapped supply of smallholder agroforestry removals ahead of pipeline listing.
Diversified income from fruit, timber, non-timber products and carbon revenue, with cash remuneration for planting and maintenance throughout the project rather than only at credit issuance.
Approximately 238,000 tonnes of CO₂ removed over 20 years, while shade cover and improved soils strengthen the resilience of cocoa farming systems to heat and irregular rainfall.
Around 1.09 million trees restore tree cover and soil fertility on farmland long converted from Guinean forest, reducing pressure on the remaining forests of the Bas-Sassandra District.
The UIREC Agroforestry Carbon Project is seeking forward offtake against its first 20-year crediting period. Talk to our VCM team about offtake, pricing, vintages and in setting structures tailored to your portfolio.