My first week in CIAT started with a meeting to discuss aspects of my project with those who are currently involved with cocoa research in Indonesia. It was interesting to see how my research will fit in with other ongoing or completed studies within CIAT. There are other research projects looking at cocoa in Indonesia at regional scales. For my project I will be working to produce a national level assessment of carbon stocks and carbon footprint of cocoa, bringing together all this regional data.
Now is a good time to offer a comment on climate change impacts on cocoa in Indonesia. Over the next century, South East Asia is predicted to experience increased temperatures, increased variability and intensity of rainfall in particular at higher altitudes, and increased risks of high intensity and frequent extreme weather events such as cyclones and droughts (IPCC, 2014). Climate change is already having an impact on cocoa crop yields in Indonesia (Witjaksono, 2016).
Coffee and cocoa are similar tree crops that have similar requirements and are often grown in similar areas. Climate modelling for coffee producing regions in Indonesia suggests that by 2050 there will be a strong decline of coffee suitability within the current growing areas due mostly to temperature increases of about 1.7 degrees across all areas (Schroth et al. 2014). Increased rainfall is expected in Aceh, North Sumatra and Sulawesi, while decreased rainfall is expected in Flores, Bali and Java. Table 2 summarises the predicted rainfall and temperature changes for these regions.
[Taken from Schroth et al. 2014]
Climate suitability maps developed from these projections illustrate the decline in climatic suitability of these regions for coffee production by 2050, for example the Sulawesi region shown below.
It is my understanding that CIAT are also in the process of developing climate suitability maps specifically for the cocoa growing regions in Indonesia. These will assist with identification of vulnerabilities and developing suitable mitigation and adaptation strategies.
In the next post I will describe CIAT’s Terra-I software for land-use change detection once I have met with the Terra-I team.