SDG synergy between agriculture and forestry in the food, energy, water and income nexus: reinventing agroforestry?

Elsevier, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 34, October 2018, Pages 33-42.
Authors: 
Meine van Noordwijk, Lalisa A. Duguma, Sonya Dewi, Beria Leimona, Delia C. Catacutan, Betha Lusiana, Ingrid Öborn, Kurniatun Hairiah and Peter A. Minang.

Abstract

Among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) three broad groups coexist: first, articulating demand for further human resource appropriation, second, sustaining the resource base, and third, redistributing power and benefits. Agriculture and forestry jointly interact with all three. The SDG portfolio calls for integrated land use management. Technological alternatives shift the value of various types of land use (forests, trees and agricultural practices) as source of ‘ecosystem services’. At the interface of agriculture and forestry the 40-year old term agroforestry has described technologies (AF1) and an approach to multifunctional landscape management (AF2). A broadened Land Equivalence Ratio (LER) as performance metric indicates efficiency. Agroforestry also is an opportunity to transcend barriers between agriculture and forestry as separate policy domains (AF3). Synergy between policy domains can progress from recognized tradeoffs and accepted coexistence, via common implementation frames, to space for shared innovation. Further institutional space for integral ‘all-land-uses’ approaches is needed.