Tag: landscapes
Agroforestry in rice-production landscapes in Southeast Asia: a practical manual
This manual has been created for rural advisors and agricultural extension workers to help them guide farmers in the integration of trees into farms in rice-production landscapes, whether rainfed, irrigated, upland or lowland. There is a growing interest from regional and local governments and others in agribusiness development and environmental management to implement agroforestry practices as a means to strengthen farmers’ resilience to climate change, as well as to fluctuations in market prices and crop yields. Trees provide benefits throughout the year and over many decades that help to spread both economic and environmental risks. We know that by integrating trees, farmers’ food and nutrition security and incomes increase and this helps nations in the region achieve their agreed contributions and commitments to the ASEAN Vision and Plan for Food, Agriculture and Forestry 2016–20251. The manual sets out the steps to follow to ensure success. While it covers many of the aspects of designing, planning and maintaining productive and resilient rice and agroforestry systems, it is still quite general because people have modified their practices over time using their own unique knowledge and skills in response to the particular conditions of the landscape. The wider social and political environment is likewise unique to each country and changes over time in response to internal and external influences. Accordingly, advisors will likely need to seek more detailed, specialist knowledge-from international, national and local agricultural, agroforestry and forestry experts and leading farmers-to apply it to the particular landscapes in which they work
Capturing gendered appreciation of multifunctional landscapes through viewscape interpretation
In the southern Philippines, the viewscape interpretation method was used to complement household interviews aimed at understanding gender-specific appreciation of landscape functions. The viewscape represents the visual connection of women and men farmers with regard to the spatial arrangement of landscape features, such as ecosystem services (ES) and land use practices which they regard as valuable.
Agroforestry as plant production system in a multifunctional landscape
Agroforestry 1 , the topic of this public lecture, refers to the (re-) integration of agriculture and forestry. It includes trees on farms, farmers in the forests and the manifold interactions between agriculture and forestry as the basis of rural livelihoods, as components of landscapes, as sectors of the economy and as opportunities and challenges to achievement of sustainable development goals in general.For a long time the dominant paradigm was that the world would be a better place if ‘ forests ’ and ‘ agriculture ’ would be handled as separate domains of policy, institutions and disciplines for applied science. It’s time for that ‘theory of change’ to change itself. Coining the term agroforestry, some 40 years ago, has created some space to do so, as we will see, but more is needed
Agroforestry Farmers’ Field Schools: Informed Farmers for Sustainable Landscapes
Farmer Field Schools are an effective extension method that facilitates two-way communication between farmers and extension agents through participatory processes that enhance farmer’s analytical skills in managing their agroforestry farms.
A Gendered perspective of forest-based livelihoods within countries in the Sentinel Landscapes Network
Conceptual analysis: The charcoal-agriculture nexus to understand the socio-ecological contexts underlying varied sustainability outcomes in African Landscapes
The production of charcoal is an important socio-economic activity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Charcoal production is one of the leading drivers of rural land-use changes in SSA, although the intensity of impacts on the multi-functionality of landscapes varies considerably. Within a given landscape, charcoal production is closely interconnected to agriculture production both as major livelihoods, while both critically depend on the same ecosystem services. The interactions between charcoal and agricultural production systems can lead to positive synergies of impacts, but will more often result in trade-offs and even vicious cycles. Such sustainability outcomes vary from one site to another due to the heterogeneity of contexts, including agricultural production systems that affect the adoption of technologies and practices. Trade-offs or cases of vicious cycles occur when one-offresource exploitation of natural trees for charcoal production for short-term economic gains permanently impairs ecosystem functions. Given the fact that charcoal, as an important energy source for the growing urban populations and an essential livelihood for the rural populations, cannot be readily substituted in SSA, there must be policies to support charcoal production. Policies should encourage sustainable technologies and practices, either by establishing plantations or by encouraging regeneration, whichever is more suitable for the local environment. To guide context-specific interventions, this paper presents a new perspective-the charcoal-agriculture nexus-aimed at facilitating the understanding of the socio-economic and ecological interactions of charcoal and agricultural production. The nexus especially highlights two dimensions of the socio-ecological contexts: charcoal value chains and tenure systems. Combinations of the two are assumed to underlie varied socio-economic and ecological sustainability outcomes by conditioning incentive mechanisms to affect the adoption of technologies and practices in charcoal and agriculture productions. Contrasting sustainability outcomes from East Africa are presented and discussed through the lens of the charcoal-agriculture nexus. The paper then concludes by emphasizing the importance of taking into account the two-dimensional socio-ecological contexts into effective policy interventions to turn charcoal-agriculture interactions into synergies. © 2017 Iiyama, Neufeldt, Njenga, Derero, Ndegwa, Mukuralinda, Dobie, Jamnadass and Mowo.
Agroforestry, a landscape approach: from promoting specific agroforestry technologies to advocating a portfolio of tree options within the landscape
cent years there has been a shift in thinking about the best way of achieving an impact with agroforestry, says Fergus Sinclair, leader of agroforestry systems research at the World Agroforestry Centre. “In the past we would pilot agroforestry technologies intensively in one village. The idea was, if it works in one place it will work in others. But that is not enough for donor organizations anymore. They want to see wide-scale adoption.” This thinking has resulted in a new research approach, from focusing on design of interventions at pilot sites to offering appropriate tree species and management options across landscapes. These may stretch over large ecological zones. World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) research on fertilizer trees in southern Africa for instance shows that the suitability of species like Sesbania or Tephrosia that can improve maize yields depends on where they are planted. “There are no silver bullet agroforestry technologies, but rather a need to customize promising options to fit local circumstances and to support farmers in trying these out,” says Sinclair. “In the past we would tell farmers, you have to do this. For some it worked, for others it didn’t. Now we say, there are several options and they choose.” Doing this effectively requires combining the most up-to-date science with local knowledge. World Agroforestry Centre scientists work on developing practical tools and approaches that can be used by extension agencies and Non governmental organisations (NGOs) to support smallholder farmers in establishing and managing tree resources in their fields, farms and landscapes.
Optimal measurement strategies for aboveground tree biomass in agricultural landscapes
Robust and cost effective methods for estimating aboveground biomass of trees on farms are necessary to understand the significance of this carbon pool, identify climate change mitigation opportunities and support smallholder farmers’ ability to capitalize on the emerging green economy. Using a dataset of 72 destructively sampled trees and 855 non-destructively sampled trees, we identified methodologically and economically efficient strategies to construct allometric equations and measure on-farm tree biomass. We found that robust biomass estimates can be obtained from measuring diameter at breast height (DBH) alone. Inclusion of tree height, specific wood density, and/or crown area in the allometric equation changed the biomass estimates by only 1.3 %, though these additional variables improved precision by reducing the error from 7.8 % to between 4.8 and 7.0 %. Research accuracy-to-cost trade-offs can be optimized by building equations based on destructive measurements of trees that span stem diameters found in the landscape; equations based on only small or large diameter trees result in poor estimates. Given (1) the resources required to measure additional dendrometric parameters in the field (2) the potential to introduce measurement errors that can propagate through estimates at farm and landscape scales, and (3) the need to quickly increase the amount of data available at low cost, we recommend that allometric equations for trees on farms be based solely on DBH and that the sampling strategy capture the range of tree sizes found in the landscape and future indirect quantification should focus on diameter at breast height as a predictor of biomass to save resources.
Annual Report 2016-2017: Harnessing the multiple benefits of trees on farms.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of trees, both for the survival of the human race and the livelihoods of billions of people. Trees contribute over 10% of the US$3.1 trillion worth of GDP created by the agricultural sector. This does not include timber sales or activities which add value to raw commodities such as chocolate, cocoa and rubber. Nor does it include the nonmonetized environmental and social benefits provided by agroforestry. Indeed, there is nothing better than a tree when it comes to sequestering carbon, bringing up water and nutrients from depth, building soil organic matter, enhancing fertility and creating more resilient agricultural landscapes. During 2016, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) drew up a new strategy to meet the challenges of the next decade. This provided the opportunity for our scientists in some 30 countries to reflect on past achievements and fine-tune plans for the future. Our primary aim is to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by harnessing the multiple benefits which trees provide. Agroforestry – agriculture with trees – can play a key role in achieving at least five of the 17 SDG focus areas. These include reducing poverty, developing sustainable systems of agriculture and improving food security, improving the efficiency of water use, helping to mitigate the impact of climate change, and halting the loss of biodiversity and restoring degraded ecosystems. Our new Corporate Strategy identifies four priority research and development themes which will enable us to tackle what we consider the main global and regional challenges. These are: improving farmland productivity and resilience; restoring degraded landscapes; supporting sustainable tree product value chains; and tackling climate change and delivering key environmental services. This year’s annual report groups our main achievements under these four challenges. Here, briefly, are some of the highlights. The Trees for Food Security project, whose first phase came to an end in 2016, was designed to enhance food security by planting trees on farms in four East African countries (see page 19). The project provides farmers with a range of agroforestry options appropriate to the ecological and social context in which they find themselves. It has also established long-term trials to shed light on the influence of trees on different cropping systems, and promoted agroforestry through rural resource centres. According to an independent review, the project has been “extremely successful, with some substantial scientific, capacity, economic and social impacts already evident in the partner countries.” Phase II of the project began in 2017.Tackling land degradation and enhancing food security lies at the heart of the Drylands Development Programme (DRYDEV), which involves some 22 partners in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Ethiopia and Kenya (see page 11). The project is working closely with farmers and farmers’ organizations to identify the most appropriate ways to enhance food production, restore degraded land and improve access to markets and financial services. It is anticipated that over 250,000 farmers will benefit by 2018. During 2016, scientists in the World Agroforestry Centre also played a key role in restoration activities as far afield as India and Brazil, and the Centre hosted a major seminar on soil restoration in Nairobi which attracted over 150 government officials, NGO workers and scientists. For many years, our commodity-focused research has sought to make tree crop value chains more sustainable. Since 2015, the World Agroforestry Centre’s Green Rubber Project has established comprehensive databases about the impact of rubber plantations, both positive and negative, in China, Laos and Thailand, and set up multisite experiments to evaluate the benefits of rubber agroforestry (see page 27). In 2016, the Centre collaborated with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to draw up new guidelines for the sustainable development of the industry. These were launched at the Sustainable Rubber Conference in Yunnan Province, and will have a major influence on the development of the natural rubber industry.