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Land degradation affects around two billion hectares across the globe, with water erosion serving as the primary driver. This depletion severely undermines food security, ecosystem services, and rural livelihoods, especially among vulnerable populations dependent on natural resources. Agroforestry offers diverse site-specific interventions to restore lands degraded by intensive farming, deforestation, mining, and overextraction. By integrating forest and fruit trees with forages, arable crops, medicinal plants, and livestock, these systems enhance financial returns while rehabilitating soil fertility, conserving biodiversity, and sequestering carbon. Tailored practices address specific restoration goals, including sand dune stabilisation, soil erosion control through alley cropping, salt land reclamation via silvopastoral setups, and water management. Realising these benefits fully requires engaging multiple stakeholders to identify best practices, diversify agroforestry designs, and adapt systems to local landscape conditions.
Land degradation threatens global food supplies and damages critical ecosystem services, hitting resource-dependent communities hardest. Agroforestry provides practical methods to rebuild depleted soils, restore damaged environments, and improve the economic resilience of rural populations. Understanding how to deploy these varied plant and livestock combinations helps land managers and policymakers simultaneously tackle rural poverty, environmental loss, and climate change pressures.
The abstract outlines established agroforestry technologies suitable for agricultural producers, forestry practitioners, and environmental restoration programmes. Applications include producing timber, fuelwood, high-value medicinal crops, and livestock on restored soils, alongside targeted solutions for erosion control and wastewater reuse. These approaches appear applied and tested across diverse settings, though commercial uptake requires stakeholder collaboration to select species combinations and adapt practices to local market and land conditions.
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Land degradation is occurring in almost all terrestrial biomes and agroecologies, in both low- and high-income countries. However, its impact is especially severe on the livelihoods of the poor, who are heavily dependent on natural resources. About two billion ha of land in the world is affected by various forms of natural and human-induced land degradation, water erosion being the main contributor (1.1 billion ha). Several scientific reports highlighted in this review show the extent to which soil degradation is threatening food security as well as ecosystem goods and services and depleting ecosystems in different regions of the world. Ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems is a global priority. The various restoration projects range in size from plot to regional level using site-specific abiotic and biotic interventions. Agroforestry encompasses a wide range of approaches and technologies for restoring degraded lands. Agroforestry options are being used to rehabilitate/restore degraded lands from intensive agriculture, soil erosion, deforestation, rangeland degradation, mining and overextraction at various scales, from plot, to ecosystem, to landscape level. By applying appropriate agroforestry technologies, involving various species of forest and fruit trees, forages, arable crops, high-value medicinal crops, dairy and meat livestock, fish and poultry, the production systems can be successfully more remunerative. Agroforestry systems (AFS), which are increasingly being considered as climate-smart agriculture, have been designed for optimization of desired outputs, such as timber or fuelwood (agrisilviculture), or for specific land rehabilitation objectives, such as protection of soil from erosion (alley cropping and sand dune stabilization), reclamation of salt lands (silvopastoral systems involving salt-adapted trees, grasses and halophytes), checking waterlogging/seepage (strip plantation along canals or boundary plantations), utilization of waste/sewage water (urban or peri-urban forestry) and assuring livelihood and nutritional security of small and marginal farmers (homegardens and social forestry). AFS play an effective role in improving soil fertility, conserving biodiversity, enhancing carbon sequestration and providing climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, there is a need to involve different stakeholders to design effective AFS for supporting sustainable productivity of land and enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services at plot and landscape scales, to identify best practices to diversify AFS and better understand soil properties and land use in degraded landscapes.
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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-4136-0_2
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