Agrogeology

Abstract

Land-use options that increase resilience and reduce vulnerability of contemporary societies are fundamental to livelihood improvement and adaptation to environmental change. Agroforestry as a traditional land-use adaptation may potentially support livelihood improvement through simultaneous production of food, fodder, and firewood as well as mitigation of the impact of climate change. To promote well-being of the society, management of multifunctional agroforestry needs to be strengthened by innovations in domestication of useful species and crafting market regimes for the products derived from agroforestry and ethnoforestry systems. Future research is required to eliminate many of the uncertainties that remain, and also carefully test the main functions attributed to agroforestry against alternative land-use options in order to know equivocally as to what extent agroforestry served these purposes. The ecological integrity of an agroforest is a state of system development in which the habitat structure, natural functions, and species composition of the system are interacting in ways that ensure its sustainability in the face of changing environmental conditions as well as both internal and external stresses (Wyant, 1996).