The Potential of Agroforestry Systems to Mitigate the Effects of Climate Change

Abstract

The global climate is changing at alarming rates as a consequence of human activities that led to increased greenhouse gas emissions and land use and land cover changes. As agriculture is intrinsically linked to climate conditions, farmers will need to adapt to enhance climate resilience. Due to the negative impacts of conventional industrial agriculture on our environment and climate, there is a growing recognition of the need of sustainable agricultural production meeting rising demand due to population growth and dietary shifts. Agroforestry emerges as a powerful tool in the agricultural sector to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. This review aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the potential of agroforestry to contribute to enhance ecosystem services in temperate climatic zones, Europe in particular. By employing the rigorous and transparent methodologies of a literature review, we focus on recent developments in agroforestry with specific attention to soil organic carbon (SOC) and biodiversity. Our analysis provides overwhelming support in the literature for the beneficial effects of agroforestry on both carbon storage and biodiversity. From our findings we can conclude that in general, agroforestry systems have larger SOC pools when comparing them to their monoculture counterparts. Furthermore, they show great potential to harbour high species richness and enhance agricultural systems’ multifunctionality through increased pollination and pest control. Not only does agroforestry support these services, but it does so at lower planting densities, which could be attributed to the undisturbed nature of these systems and their larger growing space. Hence, management regimes and age of a system are important success factors in agroforestry. These promising results positions agroforestry as a crucial approach in mitigating the effects of climate change, emphasizing its potential to store and sequester carbon effectively as well as harbour a great amount of biodiversity.