Holistic Approaches in Agroforestry

1 - Research areas are strongly oriented toward ecosystem services, especially regulating and provisioning services, while cultural services, economic dimensions, and stakeholder perspectives are still underrepresented, despite their recognized importance for the wider adoption of agroforestry systems. Specifically, policy incentives should provide targeted funding and promote holistic, practice-oriented approaches. 2 - Examining how benefits and barriers are distributed across different geographic and socio-economic contexts would generate deeper insights, particularly for resource-deprived regions where agroforestry can contribute significantly to food security and sustainability. Understanding farmers’ attitudes, perceptions, and locally specific constraints will be essential for informing interventions (...) Most studies focus on environmental benefits (of agrogorestry), while very few focus on economic and social benefits, indicating that the strength of evidence is uneven across themes. 3 - In terms of policy intervention outcomes, regulation and maintenance ecosystem services were generally well-studied, with significantly less work studying the impacts of agroforestry policy interventions on human well-being outcomes. (...) There are important research and synthesis gaps on the impacts of agroforestry on social outcomes, particularly economic and human well-being outcomes. 4 - The results of our study show that there is a significant need for further research on the socioeconomic and ecological effects of agroforestry. This need relates to synthesis of the existing evidence base on the impacts of both agroforestry interventions and practices as well as new primary research on agroforestry interventions.