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

FarmStrong Foundation, a Swiss NGO founded in 2016, works 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, which uses a Plan Vivo-certified methodology and satellite-based monitoring to convert measured carbon sequestration into tradeable Carbon Removal Units (CRUs).

Since the project began in 2021, it has covered 50,942 hectares and generated 122,457 CRUs, making it the single largest source of credits sold through Rabobank's Acorn platform — over a third of the bank's total sales. Microsoft, Acorn's first corporate customer, purchased 34,989 of these credits in 2023 for roughly €1 million, at a list price of about €35 per credit.

The project has also drawn serious scrutiny. A June 2022 audit by certification body Preferred by Nature, commissioned under Plan Vivo's own certification process, found that the CRUs issued overestimated actual greenhouse-gas removals by more than six times (600%), and that no third party had verified the credits corresponded to additional tree planting beyond what was already happening through Côte d'Ivoire's broader Cocoa & Forests Initiative. Rabobank has said it adjusted its internal calculation models but has not implemented the audit's external-verification recommendations. Separately, 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 — a double-counting risk that remained unresolved as of the audit's reporting.

Read the full analysis: https://reddmonitor.substack.com/p/rabobanks-tree-planting-project-in