Scaling up agroforestry as a forest landscape conservation and sustainable livelihood strategy

Numerous initiatives have recently launched in West Africa to help scale up agroforestry, which is regarded as a potential nature-based solution to climate mitigation, adaptation, biodiversity, and rural livelihood challenges. To date, however, there has been limited success. It is thought that a lack of land tenure and knowledge about best practices are key barriers to adoption. Using a unique quasi-experimental setting, this study seeks to assess whether tree distribution, titling, and agricultural training interventions increase agroforestry in cocoa farms. We further examine the effects of agroforestry on farm and landscape biodiversity and food production.

Project Aims

1. Identify what combinations of tree distribution, tree titling, and agricultural training interventions, if any, by supply chain actors in Ghana, can increase shade- and native-tree cover in cocoa producing farms and landscapes and lead to reduced deforestation in proximate landscapes, and
2. Assess whether there are synergies or tradeoffs between biodiversity protection, climate mitigation, and improved farm food and timber production and/or income.

Key Activities

We developed a novel transdisciplinary collaboration between academia, civil society, and supply chain actors to co-design a project that implements new capacity building policies, assesses the impacts of these policies using fieldwork and statistical analysis, and disseminates findings to existing conservation programs.

We analyse the impacts of agricultural training, tree distribution, and tree tenure on agroforestry adoption, conservation outcomes, and livelihoods using a quasi-experimental (treatment/control) approach. We gather data through household surveys and plot assessments. We analyse this data using difference in difference econometric methods and other statistical models. We will assess the moderating effects of farm characteristics and geographical and biophysical conditions through structural equation modelling.

Our study is focused in the Ashanti region of Ghana in partnership with Beyond Beans and Meridia.

Conservation Impact

The project has the potential to provide new and important evidence to inform policy interventions to protect and connect tropical forest across West Africa by advancing and integrating a suite of individual research and activities on agroforestry and zero-deforestation pursued by the project collaborators within cocoa producing landscapes. Through this unique partnership our results can be disseminated widely and directly integrated into practice, for example to inform advice and training for Gola Forest Friendly farmers as well as directly advising cocoa companies. The study may also directly influence farmer behaviour through the communication and dissemination of our results.

Expected Impact on Team Development and Capacity Building

The research advances several ongoing research projects and conservation activities at CCI:

• Cambridge research on impacts of supply chain sustainability initiatives on forest cover and equity in cocoa producing landscapes, pathways to land sparing, and forest dynamic modelling;
• UNEP-WCMC’s work within the COCOA-SOILS project to identify priority areas for agroforestry in Cote d’Ivoire;
• RSPB’s Forest Friendly program, which supports agroforestry cocoa as a REDD livelihood intervention to prevent deforestation in the Greater Gola Landscape, and their broader research on the livelihood and conservation outcomes of agroforestry intensification; and

U. of Oxford’s HARP toolkit to integrate ecological and farmer knowledge to inform agroforestry interventions.

Outputs

1. A comparative evaluation of tree distribution and tree registration programs to facilitate agroforestry adoption and maintenance + reduced deforestation in proximate forest areas in the context of broader zero-deforestation efforts.
2. Quantitative estimates of the tree, pollinator, and food abundance and diversity on farms that have different levels & types of agroforestry.
3. Inputs into how agroforestry should be included in the feasibility, design, and scalability of the Forest–Chocolate label of RSPB.
4. Policy briefs with suggestions for enabling initiatives to support agroforestry adoption and maintenance.
5. Non-technical pamphlets and videos for farmers and community leaders about agroforestry.