The Potential for Agroforestry to Ensure Multiple Ecosystem Services in Millennium Village Landscapes.

The population in East Africa is expected to more than double in the next 40-years dramatically increasing demands on already strained agricultural, fuelwood and timber resources. To meet the demands of the growing population the conversion of wildland systems (e.g. forests and savannahs) to agricultural production is likely to increase.  While this conversion may help to meet immediate needs, particularly provisioning services such as crop production for impoverished rural communities, this land-use change puts at risk the long-term availability and equitable distribution of other ecosystem services such as water for drinking and irrigation, soil fertility, pollination, and fodder for grazing. Furthermore many ecosystem services that are attributable to wildland biodiversity may not be fully replaceable in agriculturally dominated landscapes. To identify management strategies that will ensure the availability of multiple ecosystem services the tradeoffs among current and future needs in agricultural landscapes must be better understood. The Millennium Village Project provides an important opportunity to examine the potential tradeoffs for a number of management options including agroforestry.  Here we contrast current and future projections for the availability of a few key ecosystem services (e.g. food production, greenhouse gas mitigation, and fuelwood availability) in two landscapes (100 km²) surrounding Millennium Villages in Kenya and Tanzania for three possible management scenarios.  The availability of these services is compared for scenarios in each landscape dominated by either the current practice of continual low-input maize cropping, increased fertilizer use, or the adoption of agroforestry practices of improved fallows.  Results indicate that at both sites the continuation of low-input production is unlikely to meet any long-term local ecosystem service needs.  In landscapes with high population densities ecosystem service needs are most likely met using inorganic fertilizers, whereas in lower density landscapes, improved fallows are more likely to maximize the availability of multiple ecosystem services.