The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg brought renewed attention to continuing environmental degradation around the world and the need to balance concerns for environment and welfare of the world’s poorest populations.

In many tropical countries, agroforestry is at the centre of the complex and problematic relationship between human societies and the natural environment. First, agroforestry is an important land use in many of the countries that have the greatest environmental assets. Second, many of the regulations and policies put in place to protect threatened forest resources also shape the incentives of farmers to grow trees on their own farms. Third, agroforestry systems generate goods and services of value to local farmers, as well as environmental benefits of resource conservation and system resilience. ICRAFs activities on environmental services concentrate on the potential role of agroforestry systems and landscape mosaics to generate environmental services and the ways that institutions and incentive systems shape the streams of benefits and costs from alternative land uses.

Our work is organized around three of the environmental services of agroforestry namely watershed protection, biodiversity conservation and climate change, adaptation and mitigation, as well as the cross-cutting area of environmental governance.

Environmental Services at ICRAF(pdf)