Agriculture: the mitigation potential of trees on farms

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Trees on farms are globally important because they can support livelihood of rural communities while holding relevant carbon stocks in the biosphere and maintaining biodiversity in human managed areas. Moreover, they can make available to farmers some natural resources, like fuelwood, that otherwise would be extracted from forests.
How can we systematically monitor the extent of trees on farms globally and their relevance across different regions? Agroforestry – a diversified set of agricultural production systems that integrate trees in the agricultural landscape – gives an important contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation, but tree cover in agricultural land are not systematically accounted for in either global carbon budgets or national carbon accounting.

Antonio Trabucco, researcher at the CMCC Foundation – IAFES Division, explored the role of trees on agricultural land and their significance for carbon sequestration at a global level, along with recent change trends, in the CMCC seminar Tree inclusion inclusion over agricultural landscape: an undervalued potential for climate change mitigation“.
Geospatial analyses with remote sensing data show that in 2010, 43% of all agricultural land globally had at least 10% tree cover and that this has increased by 2% over the previous ten years. By combining this tree cover analysis with carbon storage estimates across different geographic and bioclimatic zones, it was estimated that agricultural land holds 45.3 PgC globally, with trees contribute for >75%.
The inclusion of tree cover is a significant feature of agriculture in all regions, but its extent varies significantly across different regions (e.g. more significant in Central America and less in East Asia). The average tree canopy cover on agricultural land increases strongly with increasing humidity and it is also influenced by population density with patterns varying across regions, thus depending on different regional socio-cultural contests. Much of Central America’s (95%) and Southeast Asian’s (77%) agriculture has >10% tree cover. Estimates for South American agriculture revealed 53%.
Significant proportions of land under tree inclusion are also found in Europe and North America (40%), East Asia (32%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (27%). South Asia and North Africa show the lowest level.

Read the integral version of the paper:

Zomer R. J., Neufeldt H., Xu J., Ahrends A., Bossio D., Trabucco A., van Noordwijk M., Wang M.
Global Tree Cover and Biomass Carbon on Agricultural Land: The contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets

2016, Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep29987

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