Integrating Landscapes: Agroforestry for Biodiversity Conservation and Food Sovereignty, second edition

Agroforestry systems (AFS) are becoming increasingly relevant worldwide as society has come to recognize their multiple roles and services: biodiversity conservation, adaptation and mitigation of climate change, restoration of degraded ecosystems, and tools for rural development. This book summarizes advances in agroforestry research and practice and the effectiveness of AFS to solve the development and environmental challenges the world presents us today.
Currently AFS are considered to be a land use that can achieve a compromise among productive and environmental functions. AFS could play a significant role in rural development even in the most challenging socioeconomic and ecological conditions, but there is still a lot of work to be done to reach these goals. Considerable funding is spent in projects directed at enhancing productivity and sustainability of smallholders’ forestry and agroforestry practices. These projects and programs face many questions and challenges, including those related to the integration of traditional knowledge to promote the most suitable systems for each situation, access to markets for AFS products, and scaling up of successful AFS. These complex questions need innovative approaches from varying perspectives and knowledge bases.
This book gathers fresh and novel contributions from authors who provide alternative and sometimes departing insights into these pressing questions.