Celebrating World Biodiversity Day 2026
Cocoa thrives in some of the world’s most biodiverse regions: West Africa’s tropical belt, the Amazon rainforest in the Americas, and Southeast Asia.
These are tropical landscapes where forests, wildlife, and farming communities have created a shared history spanning generations. But more recently, with growing talks about deforestation and environmental degradation, cocoa farming has found itself on the negative side of global conversations about land use and biodiversity.
But the relationship between cocoa and biodiversity is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Done right, cocoa farming doesn't just protect biodiversity. It is biodiversity.
A cocoa farm as an ecosystem
Walk through a well-managed cocoa farm, and you'll find more than rows of trees. You'll find a living, breathing, and constantly evolving ecosystem.
Cocoa trees grow beneath a canopy of taller shade trees. But the shade trees do more than protect the cocoa trees from the elements; , they provide nesting sites for birds and other arboreals. In turn, the birds feed on insects that would otherwise damage the crop.
Additionally, pollinators move between cocoa flowers, making fruit possible in the first place. Beneath the canopy, leaf litter shelters beetles, ants, and microorganisms that break down organic matter and feed the soil. Small mammals and reptiles use the farm as habitat and as corridors between larger forest patches.
Every layer of this system has a job. The shade trees regulate temperature and humidity. The pollinators improve yields. The natural predators keep pests in check, reducing the need for chemical input, and the soil organisms keep the land fertile.
Remove any one of these layers, and the farm becomes weaker, less productive, less resilient, and more dependent on external inputs.
This is the quiet truth behind cocoa: biodiversity isn't a bonus that sits alongside the crop. It's part of what makes the crop possible.
When the balance breaks
The picture changes when cocoa is grown in the wrong way, when forests are removed in pursuit of short-term yield gains, when the same land is pushed harder year after year without restoration, and when farms expand into ecologically sensitive areas instead of intensifying sustainably on existing land.
The ecosystem collapses in stages. Shade trees disappear. Wildlife loses habitat. Soils degrade and lose their ability to hold water. Pests multiply without their natural predators. Yields drop. And too often, the response is to expand further rather than restore what has been lost. But this pattern often ends up costing the planet, the climate, and the farmer all at once.
This is the kind of cocoa production that has fuelled concerns about the crop. But it isn't the only kind of cocoa that exists.
How Sunbeth acts on this
We’ve built biodiversity protection into our Orange Cocoa sustainability framework, which is how we work with farmers across our supply chain, broken down into three levels.
Prevent. We train farmers on the long-term consequences of deforestation as an economic and ecological reality. When farmers understand that a cleared forest leads to weaker soils, lower yields, and fewer pollinators, the forest stops being seen as an obstacle to clear. It becomes an asset to protect.
Enforce. We implement stricter measures to prevent sourcing from farms situated on recently deforested land. This single commitment may sound simple, but it has a significant effect, removing the market incentive that drives forest clearing in the first place. A buyer that won't pay for deforestation-linked cocoa is a buyer that helps protect forests.
Restore. We supply farmers with cocoa seedlings and shade trees, and we train them on the right way to plant and care for them. Shade trees are not just companions to cocoa; they shape the architecture of the entire farm ecosystem. They host the birds and pollinators, regulate the microclimate, and build climate resilience into the land itself.
Together, these three actions create a cycle: we prevent loss where we can, refuse to reward it where we can't, and actively rebuild what has already been damaged.
Local action, global impact
The 2026 theme of the International Day for Biological Diversity is Acting Locally for Global Impact. For us, that phrase is not abstract. It describes the work directly.
Every farm we work with is a small piece of a much larger ecosystem. The birds, pollinators, and soils on each of those farms are part of the same global web of life that regulates the climate, sustains forests, and feeds the world. When thousands of farmers make better decisions on their own land, the cumulative effect reaches far beyond any single hectare.
Biodiversity is not preserved by declarations. It is preserved by decisions made on individual farms, in individual supply chains, and by individual companies willing to do the work.
On this World Biodiversity Day, we invite every player in the cocoa value chain, farmers, licensed buying agents, exporters, manufacturers, and buyers, to consider what local action looks like from where they stand. Because the forest protected today is the world we share tomorrow.
