Agroforestry Systems for Climate Change Mitigation, Food Security and Rural Prosperity.

Agroforestry focuses on the role of trees and shrubs on agricultural landscapes to meet economic, social and environmental needs. The realization that agroforestry, as part of a multifunctional working landscape, offers solutions to key problems from local to global scale is growing worldwide. Agroforestry systems can help adapt to climate change in many ways.  With their inherent structural and functional diversity, agroforestry systems can be resistant and resilient to environmental uncertainties such as droughts, floods, and temperature extremes.  They can also be resistant to climate change-induced pests and diseases.  Introducing trees on farms can also mitigate increasing atmospheric CO₂ by not only sequestering more carbon, but increasing the stable carbon fraction both above and belowground. Farmland in the developing world, in particular, suffers from continuous depletion of nutrients as farmers harvest without using sufficient amounts of manure or fertilizer to replenish fertility. Agroforestry systems with nitrogen fixing trees are proven to replenish soil fertility and improve food production, thereby improving food security in many developing nations.  Agroforestry can also act as an economic engine for rural communities.  Diversifying the landscape with trees offers multiple products and environmental services with market potential.  Both primary agricultural commodities and value-added products can build and sustain economic security.  Finding markets, both locally and globally, for ecosystem services (e.g. carbon, clean water, biodiversity) generated by agroforestry could be a major breakthrough in enhancing rural prosperity using agroforestry.