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Climate-smart sustainable agriculture in low-to-intermediate shade agroforests

Nature Sustainability volume 1, pages 234–239 (2018)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 27 July 2020

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Abstract

Meeting demands for agricultural production while maintaining ecosystem services, mitigating and adapting to climate change and conserving biodiversity will be a defining challenge of this century. Crop production in agroforests is being widely implemented with the expectation that it can simultaneously meet each of these goals. But trade-offs are inherent to agroforestry and so unless implemented with levels of canopy cover that optimize these trade-offs, this effort in climate-smart, sustainable intensification may simply compromise both production and ecosystem services. By combining simultaneous measurements of production, soil fertility, disease, climate variables, carbon storage and species diversity along a shade-tree cover gradient, here we show that low-to-intermediate shade cocoa agroforests in West Africa do not compromise production, while creating benefits for climate adaptation, climate mitigation and biodiversity. As shade-tree cover increases above approximately 30%, agroforests become increasingly less likely to generate win–win scenarios. Our results demonstrate that agroforests cannot simultaneously maximize production, climate and sustainability goals but might optimise the trade-off between these goals at low-to-intermediate levels of cover.

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Fig. 1: The simultaneous costs and benefits of agroforests on production, climate adaptation, climate mitigation and biodiversity along a gradient of shade-tree cover (10–80%).
Fig. 2: The effects of agroforests on agricultural production, climate adaptation, climate mitigation and biodiversity along a gradient of shade-tree cover.

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Acknowledgements

We thank K. Oppong and D. Oppong for assistance with fieldwork, and farmers in the study region for allowing access to their farms. We further acknowledge J. O. Fening for institutional support provided by the Soil Research Institute of Ghana. We thank B. Jahn-Humphrey, G. Asamoah, B. Studer, G. Quansah, T. Afreh and M. Amponsah for laboratory assistance. C. Ofori kindly helped us with the identification of frogs. This study was funded by the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group at ETH Zurich and a grant from the Swiss-African Research Cooperation (SARECO) funded by the University of Basel, Switzerland.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sustainable Agroecosystems Group, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    W. J. Blaser, J. Landolt & J. Six

  2. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research – Soil Research Institute, Kwadaso, Kumasi, Ghana

    J. Oppong & E. Yeboah

  3. Institute of Integrative Biology, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    S. P. Hart

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  1. W. J. Blaser
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Contributions

W.J.B., S.P.H. and J.S. designed the research. W.J.B., J.O., J.L. and E.Y. performed the research. W.J.B., S.P.H. and J.S. analysed and interpreted the data. W.J.B. wrote the first draft and S.P.H. and J.S. contributed to revisions.

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Correspondence to W. J. Blaser.

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Blaser, W.J., Oppong, J., Hart, S.P. et al. Climate-smart sustainable agriculture in low-to-intermediate shade agroforests. Nat Sustain 1, 234–239 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0062-8

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