Accelerating Sustainable Landscape Management through Agroforestry
Across much of the world, agricultural systems, ecosystem health, landscape integrity, and rural resource-based livelihoods are in crisis, with major planetary boundaries having already been transgressed.
Over the next few decades, agriculture and food systems likely will be forced to go through an extraordinary transition to meet food production in a more sustainable way.
This is especially relevant in a global context under which climate change, growing populations, regional inequalities and economic transformations all pose complex and largely intractable challenges for rural landscapes. Navigating these challenges more sustainably implies identifying new ways to manage our natural resource base to secure the full range of ecosystem goods and services potentially provided by landscapes, capitalizing on synergies and reducing tradeoffs. Biodiversity and ecosystem conservation strategies are also in urgent need of transformation, embedding them more deliberately into increasingly production-oriented landscapes and considering human well-being in a more inclusive sense than in the past.
In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly defined 17 Sustainable Development Targets that are intended to be achieved by the year 2030. In the context of this “Agenda 2030”, sustainable landscape management has been recognized as a key strategy to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in agricultural and forestry production landscapes globally.
Sustainable landscape management conceives conservation and restoration of biodiversity, the production of food, the protection of critical ecosystem services, and rural livelihoods as joint objectives, rather than dealing with them in isolation or in direct confrontation.
A landscape approach enables synergies and tradeoffs among ecological, economic, cultural, and social objectives to be examined at a larger-than-farm scale to reveal how interactions among different land uses are complementary and/or competing. Management strategies within and across the four aforementioned objectives thus can be negotiated between multiple stakeholders to produce an optimal balance of multiple objectives within any given landscape context. Adopting such an approach to management implies working across sectors to ensure that knowledge and information as well as land uses, markets, and policy strategies are adequately integrated. This “integrated” approach to realizing sustainable landscapes is thus a fundamental precept of sustainable landscape management
SDGs implementation through sustainable landscape management builds on multifunctional land-use systems that contribute to the mutual alignment of frequently confronted production and conservation aims. Agroforestry systems comprise land uses that combine aspects of agriculture and forestry, including the agricultural use of trees.
Agroforestry holds promise to play a major role in the transformation of agriculture towards achieving the SDGs, especially regarding the mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
Forty-three percent of the world’s agricultural lands have a tree cover of at least 10%. Although not all of these land-use types and landscapes include explicit agroforestry systems, this estimate indicates that the potential of using agroforestry for sustainable landscape management is vast.
In a recently published special feature of the “Sustainability Science” journal, José Muñoz-Rojas, Louise E. Buck, Sara J. Scherr and myself scrutinized — together with altogether 63 contributors — the role of agroforestry in sustainable landscape management strategies and also, vice-versa, how the latter might help improve the application, scaling, and sustainability of agroforestry systems. For that purpose, we assembled 11 studies from across the world — including both the Global South and the Global North — that explored the mutual interactions between agroforestry and sustainable landscape management. The studies investigated for instance, the social-ecological drivers and processes of expansion and decline of agroforestry landscapes; the performance of agroforestry in contributing to multiple sustainability objectives at landscape scale; issues of scaling up agroforestry through multi-stakeholder landscape strategies; and conceptual and operational tools for analyzing agroforestry adoption.
What do we take out of this global overview of agroforestry and sustainable land management? We identified six key messages as particularly relevant for agroforestry to become a central part of sustainable landscape management.
1. Agroforestry has been considered a niche-discipline for too long. Rather, agroforestry should become a distinctive research area under the umbrella of sustainability science, thus moving toward an “agroforestry sustainability science”. Integrating agroforestry’s central role in sustainable landscape management may help overcome the lack of adoption and maintenance that is a challenge to many agroforestry practices and systems.
2. Natural resource management is determined by path dependencies that often have developed over decades, if not centuries and millennia. Agroforestry for sustainable landscape management therefore needs understanding of local land-use trajectories, histories, and traditions. This includes gaining a better understanding of farmers’ attitudes toward agroforestry over time, as farmers are the key actors driving historic and current land-use change.
3. Agroforestry strategies should not be confined to the farm and plot scales. Meaningful contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals depend on upscaling agroforestry to generate benefits at landscape scale. A diversity of agroforestry practices, implemented in the right locations of a landscape, counting with the right management, can not only benefit the farmers and land managers practicing them, but also other actors and their networks in the landscape.
4. To sustain the long-term practice of agroforestry, considering and promoting its multiple economic benefits as well as environmental, social, and cultural values is essential. This means actively supporting market and business development that render agroforestry viable, so that these land-use systems and related landscapes can retain key values as they evolve dynamically over time.
5. Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals requires fostering and experimenting with inclusive forms of landscape governance, mainstreaming policy fields also beyond public agricultural and forestry policies. This includes fostering strong multi-stakeholder coalitions within landscape units, and more efficient coordination, cooperation, and shared and mutual learning in support of agroforestry upscaling.
6. A variety of unique and creative tools should be embraced for supporting the innovation process of agroforestry system analysis and design in the context of sustainable landscape pursuits. These should take into account the multi-dimensional properties of agroforestry in sustainable landscapes, including their multi-functional land use characteristics and/or the collaboration requirements in integrated management and governance.
Full paper: Plieninger, T., Muñoz-Rojas, J., Buck, L.E. & Scherr, S.J. (2020): Agroforestry for sustainable landscape management. Sustainability Science 15: 1255–1266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00836-4
