“MORE EFFORT, BUT LESS YIELD”
Cocoa Farmers, Climate Change, and the Cost of Big Chocolate’s Inaction

Climate change is having increasingly devastating impacts on a global scale and is becoming an additional and escalating threat to the livelihoods of Ivorian cocoa farmers. This report examines how climate change has led to shifting weather patterns, declining soil quality, and diseases and pests that adversely affects cocoa production and compounds the longstanding challenges facing Ivorian cocoa farmers. The report also details current effective and ineffective climate adaptation efforts and argues that cocoa farmers cannot be expected to shoulder climate adaptation’s associated cost. Rather, cocoa-purchasing corporations, which have built up vast resources off the backs of cocoa farmers, bear responsibility for driving systemic climate adaptation.

Research

We study the laws that govern corporate behavior and identify how and why such laws fail to hold corporations accountable for the human rights violations and environmental harms occurring across  their supply chains.

Legal Design

We design strategic interventions into global supply chains to better protect human rights and the environment through novel litigation strategy and new forms of worker empowerment.

Collaboration 

We collaborate with lawyers, law school clinics, other corporate accountability NGOs, and workers to workshop our designs, coordinate strategy, and implement our strategic interventions.