- A new comment article published in Nature Climate Change makes the case for more forest-based agroforestry — integrating crops into existing forests — as an underutilized climate and livelihood solution.
- The authors find that there’s a noticeable lack of funding for forest-based methods compared to field-based agroforestry, in which trees are added to pasture and croplands, which they say has led to missed opportunities for carbon storage and biodiversity.
- A lack of consensus and understanding on how to define agroforestry is another factor in the misalignment of intentions and outcomes of agroforestry as a climate solution.
- The authors call on policymakers and scientists to fund and study forest-based agroforestry methods with more rigor, especially in places where people depend on rural livelihoods such as agriculture.
Not all agroforestry projects are funded equally, suggests a new comment paper published in Nature Climate Change. Integrating crops into existing forests is an often overlooked agroforestry method to store carbon while creating sustainable livelihoods, according to the authors.
The article, published in late May, draws on literature and real-world examples of the lesser-known practice of mixing crops with standing trees. The authors define two categories of methods as “forest-based” versus “field-based” agroforestry. Forest-based refers to integrating crops into existing forests and ecosystems, whereas field-based refers to adding trees to pasturelands or croplands. The latter is not only much more common, but also much better funded, the authors report, in part because of misconceptions that forest-based methods lead to deforestation.
While this is sometimes true in tropical environments with crops like coffee or cacao, forest-based agroforestry can actually help restore temperate ecosystems, the authors say.
“You have to think differently about tropical and temperate forests,” said Karam Sheban, the lead author and an agroforestry doctoral candidate at the Yale School of the Environment and New York Botanical Garden. “We can’t just export this idea we have about cutting down rainforest to grow coffee into temperate systems.”
The agroforestry gap
For Sheban, who has worked in temperate agroforestry systems for a decade, it was obvious that there was a bias toward field-based agroforestry from the very beginning of his career. Straight out of college, he volunteered for AmeriCorps with the NGO Rural Action in Ohio’s Appalachian region, where communities used agroforestry to revive cultural traditions and boost economic development, Sheban said. It’s a practice better known as forest farming.
Eventually, when he applied for his own grants as a Yale graduate student through the Inflation Reduction Act’s Climate-Smart Commodities funding, his proposal was denied. That’s when he noticed that the vast majority of funded projects were those that add trees to pastures or crops — in other words, field-based agroforestry.
“There was just a question in there of like, what’s going on? Why is this a pattern we’re seeing?” Sheban said.
As he dug into the literature, he found that scientists had identified this gap — a lack of research on forest-based agroforestry systems in different cultures around the world — as far back as the 1980s. So why the preference for field-based agroforestry?
A complex climate solution
In recent years, agroforestry has bloomed in popularity as a climate mitigation measure, but the practice has existed for thousands of years across cultures, especially in Indigenous communities. As it became more popular in the tropics, however, it became more commonly misapplied without tailoring it to a location’s unique qualities, Sheban said, such as soil type, forest composition and weather patterns.
Agroforestry has also become a key part of global frameworks such as The Nature Conservancy’s Natural Climate Solutions. In 2023, the NGO published a paper in Nature Climate Change that analyzed different types of agroforestry as natural climate solutions — mostly in tropical environments.
“We emphasize that [when] some agroforestry is established within forest, you wind up losing carbon because they’ve thinned the trees, for example, to sort of open up the space and then put in cocoa,” said Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist for TNC and co-author of the 2023 paper.
At a basic level, the paper suggested that “this is good when we plant trees and it’s bad when it happens in forests,” Sheban told Mongabay. “This is exactly the kind of problematic narrative that is driving funding and policy away from agroforestry in forests.”
That’s because forest-based agroforestry in other places, like temperate forests, where much of the forest is already disturbed, isn’t necessarily bad, he said. Many Indigenous agroforestry systems, such as forest gardens in British Columbia, require forest management where some trees are removed in the short term to open the understory, which improves the forest’s overall health, resilience and carbon storage in the long term, he added.
When oversimplified as a natural climate solution, even tree-adding agroforestry can lead to undesirable side effects, Sheban said. When projects in tropical locations are replicated in temperate or boreal locations, it can actually cause harm because those ecosystems act very differently.
In high-moisture environments, for example, plants are well-watered but compete for sunlight. Under these conditions, shade from trees can suppress grass growth by stealing sunlight. But in dry environments, where there is plenty of light and not enough water, tree shade can increase the water available to grasses by reducing water evaporation from the soil.
“So, when you change the environment, the relationship can flip,” Sheban said.
Yet, it’s difficult for communities living in non-tropical environments to apply appropriate agroforestry techniques because most of the scientific literature focuses on tropical systems, Sheban added. This leads to funders and policymakers being hesitant to implement the potentially climate-friendly practice in temperate areas.
On the flip side, there’s the idea that all agroforestry is beneficial. But lots of commercially grown crops labeled as “agroforestry” are starkly misaligned with its basic principles. Shade-grown coffee, for example, or cacao plantations are often categorized as such, but can result in deforestation because of high-pressure, industrialized supply chains, negating the benefits of true agroforestry.
“Just because it’s forest-based agroforestry doesn’t mean it’s a natural climate solution,” Cook-Patton said. “You’d have to demonstrate that you were either boosting carbon stocks through time or preventing carbon from being lost.”
What makes a beneficial agroforestry project?
While the concept of agroforestry is simple — mixing crops and trees on the same land — it goes a long way toward maintaining biodiversity, restoring soil degraded after years of monocropping, and storing carbon, Sheban said, and as several studies have shown.
In North America, a common example is maple syrup production, where a native forest doubles as agriculture, making it a key example of temperate agroforestry. But that scenario can be thrown out of balance if, for example, a maple syrup producer decided to increase yields by growing more maple trees at the expense of other native trees.
“That is reducing biodiversity,” Sheban said. “It’s making that forest more susceptible to pests and pathogens. You’re essentially just decreasing the resilience of that forest.”
Meanwhile, home gardens, such as those in Southeast Asia, are a less common form of agroforestry. These can foster hundreds of species of native plants for food and medicine between patches of primary forests, Sheban said, boosting overall diversity across the landscapes that humans and wildlife share.
Among the most important factors is understanding the history of the land, he added. Cutting down primary (intact, undisturbed) forests for shade-grown coffee, for example, could technically be called forest-based agroforestry. But that’s more harmful than adding trees to a historically farmed pastureland, and more harmful than integrating crops into an existing forest.
Ideally, “you’re not displacing a more complex system to make it less complex,” Sheban said.
There’s also great potential for private lands to use forest-based agroforestry, he added. In the U.S., nearly 60% of forest land is privately owned. “It is a real conservation opportunity,” Sheban said.
He said he hopes this paper and others strengthen global policies so that “we can fund agroforestry that is achieving these positive outcomes, instead of cutting anything out that might otherwise actually do good on the landscape.”
Banner image: Modern maple (Acer spp.) sap extraction system in eastern North America with a stewarded wild population of ramps (Allium tricoccum) on the forest floor. Based on Indigenous approaches, in these modern systems tree sap is boiled down to produce maple syrup, sugar and other edible products, and the above- and below-ground portion of ramps are sold commercially and consumed as food. In these systems, additional tree species can be tapped for sap, tree fruits and nuts can be harvested, and dozens of edible, medicinal and handicraft herbs and shrubs can be integrated into the system through intentional cultivation or by stewarding existing wild populations. Image courtesy of Michelle Pedretti/Maple Valley Cooperative.
Citations:
Sheban, K. C., Kuebbing, S. E., Duguid, M. C., Ashton, M. S., McAlvay, A. C., Munsell, J. F., … Bradford, M. A. (2025). Keeping forests on the agroforestry agenda. Nature Climate Change, 15(6), 581-584. doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02344-8.
Terasaki Hart, D. E., Yeo, S., Almaraz, M., Beillouin, D., Cardinael, R., Garcia, E., … Cook-Patton, S. C. (2023). Priority science can accelerate agroforestry as a natural climate solution. Nature Climate Change, 13(11), 1179-1190. doi:10.1038/s41558-023-01810-5
Abbas, F., Hammad, H. M., Fahad, S., Cerdà, A., Rizwan, M., Farhad, W., … Bakhat, H. F. (2017). Agroforestry: A sustainable environmental practice for carbon sequestration under the climate change scenarios — A review. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 24(12), 11177-11191. doi:10.1007/s11356-017-8687-0
De Beenhouwer, M., Geeraert, L., Mertens, J., Van Geel, M., Aerts, R., Vanderhaegen, K., & Honnay, O. (2016). Biodiversity and carbon storage co-benefits of coffee agroforestry across a gradient of increasing management intensity in the SW Ethiopian highlands. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 222, 193-199. doi:10.1016/j.agee.2016.02.017
Kay, S., Rega, C., Moreno, G., Den Herder, M., Palma, J. H., Borek, R., … Herzog, F. (2019). Agroforestry creates carbon sinks whilst enhancing the environment in agricultural landscapes in Europe. Land Use Policy, 83, 581-593. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.02.025
Mohri, H., Lahoti, S., Saito, O., Mahalingam, A., Gunatilleke, N., Irham, … Herath, S. (2013). Assessment of ecosystem services in homegarden systems in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Ecosystem Services, 5, 124-136. doi:10.1016/j.ecoser.2013.07.006
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