- Agroforestry is recognized as a way to boost local biodiversity, improve soils and diversify farming incomes. New research suggests it may also benefit nearby forests by reducing pressure to clear them.
- The study found agroforestry has helped reduce deforestation across Southeast Asia by an estimated 250,319 hectares (618,552 acres) per year between 2015 and 2023, lowering emissions and underscoring its potential as a natural climate solution.
- However, the findings also indicate agroforestry worsened deforestation in many parts of the region, highlighting a nuanced bigger picture that experts say must be heeded.
- Local social, economic and ecological factors are pivotal in determining whether agroforestry’s impacts on nearby forests will be positive or negative, the authors say, and will depend on the prevalence of supportive policies.
Intensifying heat waves, extreme floods and forest fires have devastated parts of Southeast Asia in recent years, spurring experts and authorities to look for holistic solutions. Agroforestry, the practice of growing crops alongside useful trees and shrubs, is increasingly touted as one such solution that simultaneously addresses the biodiversity and climate crises while enhancing farmer livelihoods and meeting societal needs for food, timber and other key products.
Now, a new study published in Nature Sustainability suggests the benefits of this more climate-friendly and sustainable farming method might extend even further. The findings reveal agroforestry has helped reduce deforestation across Southeast Asia by an estimated 250,319 hectares (618,552 acres) per year between 2015 and 2023, preventing between 43.3 million and 74.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.
“These diverse [agroforestry] systems can provide alternative sources of income [for farmers] — fuelwood, timber, fruits, and other products — reducing the economic pressure to clear more forests,” study lead author Steve Hoong Chen Teo, a researcher at the National University of Singapore, told Mongabay.
Teo and his colleagues found that areas of Southeast Asia with agroforestry typically lost less forest than similar areas without it, resulting in a net reduction in deforestation across landscapes where agroforestry is practiced. The team suggest this is primarily due to the relative efficiency and profitability of agroforestry reducing farmers’ need to encroach into surrounding forests.
“While benefits vary by region, overall we found that agroforestry can help conserve forest remnants in [agricultural] landscapes,” Teo said, adding that the scale of the greenhouse gas emissions saving is “meaningful” and underscores the utility of agroforestry as a climate mitigation solution.
“Agroforestry landscapes in Southeast Asia often retain relatively high biomass compared to conventional farms, which translates into carbon storage benefits,” Teo said. When taken together with its ability to reduce pressure on nearby forests, agroforestry is an appealing climate mitigation solution, he said.
Nature-based climate solutions are especially relevant in Southeast Asia, where millions of people’s lives and livelihoods are inextricably tied to its ecosystems, as is the survival of a wide range of animal and plant species. Southeast Asia’s agricultural land also holds the highest levels of aboveground carbon per unit area of all farmland globally due to the prevalence of tree-derived products. This makes the region well-placed to tackle both the biodiversity and climate crises by implementing more sustainable methods of farming like agroforestry.
Nuance indicates where policy can help
In Southeast Asia, a range of major commercial crops are cultivated in agroforestry settings, from coffee and cacao, to rice, rubber and timber. According to the study, 18% of the region’s total land area is under agroforestry, where mainstays include fruit trees, such as coconut, durian, jackfruit and mango, and nontimber forest products such as honey, rattan and mushrooms. Research is also ramping up on the feasibility of cultivating oil palm in an agroforest setting.
To analyze the impact of agroforestry on annual deforestation rates, the team broke the region down into 38 subnational units and used a technique called causal inference to compare similar areas with and without agroforestry. This technique of comparison helped ensure they were looking at effects due to agroforestry rather than other factors, such as climate or socioeconomic conditions, Teo said.
They found agroforestry reduced deforestation in 22 of the 38 subnational units, based on annual deforestation rates from 2015 to 2023, particularly in Laos, northern Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia, the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and the island of Borneo, shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. In contrast, agroforestry appeared to worsen deforestation in 16 subnational units, such as eastern Cambodia.
Ultimately, the local social, economic and ecological conditions play a pivotal role in determining whether the impact of agroforestry is positive or negative, said study co-author Lian Pin Koh, a professor of conservation at the National University of Singapore.
“Variables such as land tenure, government policies, market demand, community governance and individual motivations all shape how agroforestry is adopted and expanded,” Koh told Mongabay in an email. “In some contexts, these factors align to support sustainable land use, reducing pressure on forests. In others, they may incentivize expansion into forested areas, exacerbating deforestation.”
Thomas Cherico Wanger, a group leader at Agroscope, the federal agricultural research institute of Switzerland, welcomed the findings as a robust contribution to the unfolding narrative on agroforestry’s biodiversity and climate sequestration benefits. “It’s important to place agroforestry production systems in Southeast Asia into the broader discussion since there is so much biodiversity in the region, so much deforestation from oil palm and rubber, and there are so many different types of crops that you can farm as agroforestry,” said Wanger, who was not involved in the study.
However, he cautioned against interpreting the results too simplistically. While the study shows agroforestry helped to mitigate deforestation in many places, the overall picture is much more nuanced, he said, indicating that agroforestry has important implications for deforestation and carbon sequestration. “The message is not simply that agroforestry is great. For some target crops, it can be a silver bullet, but for others, there is still more work to be done,” he said.
Wanger cited the example of cocoa production on the Indonesian islands of Sulawesi and Sumatra, where agroforestry farmers have to optimize pollination on their farms to achieve yields approaching those of monocultures. By contrast, rubber agroforestry systems in Thailand can result in increased yields over monoculture, he noted. “So agroforestry in Southeast Asia cannot be said to behave the same across the whole region.”
While the study’s models didn’t identify agroforestry systems that were particularly effective at reducing deforestation, or the specific social, economic or ecological factors driving the variations in agroforestry’s impact, the authors make several policy recommendations they say can help ensure positive outcomes.
Programs promoting agroforestry should include provisions on securing land tenure and land-use rights for smallholders and Indigenous and local communities, the study says. They should also include careful land-use planning, incentives that improve the productivity and profitability of existing farmland, and technical support on sustainable practices.
If well-implemented, the authors note that policies supportive of community-managed agroforestry, such as the recent expansion of Indonesia’s social forestry areas to encompass 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres), could go a long way to addressing the twin threats of biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.
Banner image: An agroforestry farmer harvests cacao in Sulawesi in Indonesia. Image by Yusuf Ahmad/World Agroforestry Centre via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Carolyn Cowan is a staff writer for Mongabay.
Citation:
Teo, H. C., Lamba, A., Ng, S. J., Nguyen, A. T., Dwiputra, A., Lim, A. J., … Koh, L. P. (2025). Reduction of deforestation by agroforestry in high carbon stock forests of Southeast Asia. Nature Sustainability, 8, 358-362. doi:10.1038/s41893-025-01532-w
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