Data Resources

This project isn’t based on a singular data source and requires aggregating multiple available datasets together in order to offer the breadth and depth analysis on this topic. Datasets used in this project were mostly collected from governmental or non-profit organizations dedicated to environment study or forests’ monitoring. Some datasets were collected from cocoa focused organizations such as ICCO (International Cocoa Organization), World Cocoa Foundation and ICI (International Cocoa Initiative).

Data	Description
Global Cocoa Production in 2019	Gro Intelligence, "As Cocoa Harvest Begins, Risks Emerge From Major ...." 24 Oct. 2019
Global Cocoa Trade	Gro Intelligence, "Developing Economies Challenge Europe's Chocolate Reign ...." 16 May. 2018
Global Cocoa Trade Data	Resource Trade.Earth, The trade data on this site are from the Chatham House Resource Trade Database (CHRTD)
World cocoa bean production, grindings and stocks	International Cocoa Organization
Information Sheet on Cocoa	Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Chocolate: The Journey from Beans from Bars	Rainforest-alliance.org
Cocoa Farming and Primate Extirpation Inside Cote D'ivoire's Protected Areas	SAGE JOURNALS
The production process – from cocoa beans to semi finished products	European Cocoa Association

Mindmap

Considered the vast scope of datasets and how verbose the webpage length could become. Instead of arranging all contents on the same page and involving an “endless” scrolling, I decided to divide them into four sections based on the internal dependency. Meanwhile the section sequence is tailored based on narrative logics which will make the datasets and statements suggested in this project more pellucid to my target audiences.

Storyboard

Users land on a homepage which adopts a horizontal scrolling structure. The “chocolate label” on the homepage summarizes my project title and provides a glance at the topic but not giving away too much information at the same time. As they scroll to the right side, it feels like unwrapping a chocolate bar and it also reveals the introduction about this project as well as a menu of each section’s title. Although users may choose any section to begin with, the suggested order is from PART1 to PART4.

Treatment

My target audiences are lay people who aren’t professionals or experts in both the cocoa and chocolate industry, therefore in order to avoid faultage of conception, I included definitions for some terminology words that appeared in the visualization.Inspired by the explanatory genre of a storytelling data visualization’s structure, this project adopts the scrolly-telling method which allows audiences to dive into the data stories at their own paces.

CODING

This thesis project went through a long process from ideation, mind-map, prototyping, data cleaning to final execution. I’m using d3.js as the main language in this project, in some sections I also utilized Mapbox GL to present the spatialized data.

Through identifying each type of deforestation that has taken place during the cocoa cultivation process, we would remedy the problem with potential solutions. One of them is to advocate a better alternative to monoculture farming method which is agroforestry. Some farming sites have already put the method into test and the result is positive. My hope is that with more and more research being done in multi-functionality comparisons, it could help scientists and decision makers to determine long-term strategies which would use plant biodiversity as an actionable lever to adapt and mitigate climate change. Besides supporting chocolate companies who are dedicated to creating chocolate from deforestation-free cocoa beans, as customers we can also minimize our food waste footprint to appreciate the hardship behind every production.