FarmStrong Foundation Cocoa Agroforestry Carbon Programme — Nawa Region (Côte d'Ivoire)

Swiss NGO FarmStrong Foundation (founded 2016) has, since 2021, worked with cocoa-growing communities in Côte d'Ivoire's Nawa Region (around Soubré and Abengourou) to interplant existing cocoa farms with timber and fruit trees under Rabobank's Acorn agroforestry carbon programme. The scheme uses a Plan Vivo-certified methodology and satellite-based monitoring to convert measured carbon sequestration into tradeable Carbon Removal Units (CRUs), and has become the single largest source of credits sold through the Acorn platform.

The programme has covered 50,942 hectares and generated 122,457 CRUs since 2021 — over a third of all credits sold through Acorn — including 34,989 credits purchased by Microsoft in 2023 for roughly €1 million. However, a June 2022 audit by certification body Preferred by Nature, commissioned under Plan Vivo's own certification process, found that the credits issued overestimated actual greenhouse-gas removals by roughly 600%, and that no third party had verified the credits corresponded to tree planting beyond what was already occurring under Côte d'Ivoire's broader Cocoa & Forests Initiative. In November 2023, Côte d'Ivoire's environment minister asked Rabobank to suspend activities in the Nawa Region because the project area overlapped with government forest-carbon credits already sold to the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, an unresolved double-counting risk.