Futre Of Agroforestry Science Dg Seminar

The Future of Agroforestry
Science
January 26, 2007

Questions

 Is something historically unique happening
in the world of agroforestry right now?
 What might it signify?
 How might it impact on the development of
our focused scientific agenda?
 Where are we in the process of developing
our new strategic plan?
 How shall we are moving forward?

WORLD AGROFORESTRY CENTRE

Is something historically unique happening
in the world of agroforestry right now?

 Observation: Most of the global institutions
involved in poverty and environment are suddenly
and intensively reaching out to agroforestry and
to the World Agroforestry Centre.
 Observation: They are approaching us to work
with us, learn from us, support us, and benefit
from our science in addressing big global
issues…

Who are these institutions?

The institutions we’re talking about here are the virtually all of the big
multilateral institutions and the largest environmental and poverty-
related NGOs. There are numerous examples.

 The World Bank is a good one to start with: The Bank’s multi-
hundred million dollar investment programme on land degradation in
Africa has asked us to deploy our pioneering methods in assessing
land degradation in their monitoring systems in all of their projects.
The GEF has done likewise.
 The World Bank Institute and the BioCarbon Fund has begun
working with us intensively on new approaches to climate change
adaptation and mitigation.
 And most recently, the Bank’s Forestry Group has asked us to help
them develop a Global Forestry Alliance proposal to massively scale-
up smallholder agroforestry in Africa through a portfolio of new
projects intent upon making impact on the lives of millions of
smallholder households.
 GEF – on land degradation, and on public-private partnerships for the
environment.
 UNEP has asked us to partner with them in The Billion Trees
Initiative and allied efforts to overcome land degradation.

 The UNDP has requested us to deploy our
science and experience in building capacity
at the regional and national levels related to
their MDG Carbon Initiative.
 NEPAD has approached us to develop a
continental initiative on soil science.
 FARA has asked us to lead a massive
capacity-building effort through ANAFE.
 Likewise, some of the largest and most
respected NGOs have been approaching us
to partner with them as well. WWF has
sought us to partner with them in
developing a smallholder carbon toolbox –
assembling the methods by which successful
smallholder projects can be designed,
implemented, monitored and evaluated.

 The Clinton Foundation is intensively interacting
with us about leading the science in a new global
Carbon – Poverty Reduction initiative based on
smallholder agroforestry.
 CARE, World Vision, and The Greenbelt
Movement are also developing new collaboration
with us on this front.
 Conservation International has developed with us
the Hotspots Alliance.
 This list of examples doesn’t even include the
private sector companies that are now actively
engaging us in joint agroforestry research
activities. Companies such as the Mars
Corporation and Unilever.
 The list goes on. But the significant point is that
these organizations are approaching us, and in
many cases developing frameworks to support our
work for mutual benefit.

Much of this has to do with accelerating
interest in Climate Change

Act Now, Before It is Too Late
Article in The New Scientist

“Time is running out, and fast. Rising carbon
dioxide levels and higher temperatures will soon
set in motion potentially catastrophic changes that
will take hundreds or even thousands of years to
reverse.” -- New Scientist, Nov 2006


Climate Change
Researchers have highlighted evidence
that the danger is more pressing than
was thought.
Three distinct types of danger:
 The first one is incremental changes in
average climate conditions to which
people must adapt.


Climate Change

 The second is the effect these conditions
have on increasing the chances of
extreme events, such as devastating
hurricanes (eg Katrina), or heat waves
such as 2002 in Europe that killed
30,000 people.


Climate Change
 The third is ‘waking the sleeping giants’
triggering irreversible changes in natural
systems, such as
-- the melting of polar ice caps that will raise
sea levels enormously, and
-- the warming of the permafrost that will
release huge quantities of carbon dioxide. This
will throw global CO2 emissions into fast-
forward irreversibly.

Climate Change
Act Now, Before It is Too Late (cont’d)
Once we pass these thresholds there will be no return.
But we are closer to these tipping points than previously
supposed – only a decade away in some cases. We have
got to act much faster and more comprehensively than
virtually anyone imagined until recently.

“If we go beyond 2 degrees C we will raise hell.”
-- John Schellnhuber, Director of the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research in Cambridge, UK.


Stern report on the economics of climate
change (October 2006)
 The benefits of strong, early action considerably outweigh
the costs.
 Unabated climate change could cost the world at least 5%
of GDP each year; more dramatic predictions would
reduceGDP as much as 20%.
 The cost of reducing emissions could be limited to around
1% of global GDP.
 Each tonne of CO2 we emit causes damages worth at least
$85, but emissions can be cut at a cost of less than $25 a
tonne.

And the world is (finally) waking up

“I’ve never seen a phenomenon take over the
public consciousness like climate change”.

– David Crane, CEO, NRG Energy, Princeton NJ


What is significant is that 20 % of gross
GHGs are emitted by land use change and
deforestation

So as the world begins to panic at the
catastrophic consequences of the greenhouse
effect it won’t be long before the climate
change community begins to seriously turn its
attention to agriculture and forestry. And
when it does, the world of agriculture will be
changed forever.

Analysis -- What will this mean for farming
systems in the tropics?
A Real Incentive to Reverse Deforestation
 Got to figure out how to drastically reverse the
destruction and degradation of forest lands throughout
the world. It can be done…and it has already been done
in the northern hemisphere.
 A real revolution in land use in the southern hemisphere
is going to be necessary – and very soon.
 This calls for a whole new effort geared to finding ways to
rapidly slow down and reverse deforestation in the
tropics.
 Avoided deforestation is a global challenge if there ever
was one.

Capturing carbon in agricultural lands

 We must also find ways of reversing the loss of
CO2 from agricultural lands by developing
farming systems that stop generating net CO2
and sequester more CO2.
 This is a clarion call for a transformation of the
world’s farming systems.
 There are two ways that current farming
systems can reverse net CO2 emissions from
the land…

1st, Phasing out tillage…
 …So that carbon can re-accumulate below-
ground in the soil.
 Reduced tillage and zero tillage farming
systems must now be instituted everywhere.
 Innovative ways of incorporating trees into
farming systems to enable better weed
suppression and to reduce the need for
nitrogen fertilizer will be seen to have much
greater added benefits than ever before.

2nd, Increase above-ground carbon
 All agricultural systems will have to find ways
to increase above-ground carbon. This means
integrating trees in these systems.
 The world will need to find ways of integrating
trees into farming systems on a massive scale so
that every hectare of agricultural land becomes
a sink for carbon, no longer a source.
 Thus, agroforestry will increasingly be seen as
the future of world land use systems.

Addressing climate change promises to
transform agriculture everywhere in the world
 The future of that transformed agriculture is the
intensification of tree culture on all types of
farmland, community land, and urban areas.
 There are a billion hectares of agroecosystems in the
tropical world alone where agroforestry can
contribute to the reversal of current carbon
emissions (IPCC, 2001)
 The sequestration of carbon through agroforestry
can soak up substantive amounts of the current
fossil-fuel based emissions (perhaps 1 Gt C per year
of the current 6 Gt C that is being emitted).

Agroforestry will be seen as the heart
of the matter
 In addressing the climate change, biodiversity,
and desertification conventions in ways that it
was not viewed before…
 Because poverty can be addressed
simultaneously.
 Hypothesis:The world will soon be keen to
adopt agroforestry as a universal means of
addressing its greatest challenges on a holistic,
integrated basis.

Agroforestry at the heart of it all
 The World Agroforestry Centre is increasingly
being seen as the partner of choice in efforts to
generate solutions to the challenge of climate
change adaptation and mitigation in the tropics.
 This role will increase in the future.
 Centre scientific leadership in this area calls for a
definitive and quantitative set of scenarios that
show the way in which carbon balances are
currently moving in agroecosystems globally, and
will proceed under varying policy and investment
scenarios in the future.


Agroforestry at the heart of it all
 We need to develop a spatial and temporal model
of global agricultural systems that calculates the
effects of the alternative scenarios.
 The model must interact with the modeling of
industrial GHG emissions and their future
scenarios.
 As the world gets serious about the necessity for an
all-out approach to managing GHGs to forestall
climatic disaster, there will be a lot of attention to
real investment in science-based practical farming
solutions.

Integrated, complex problems –
that is our mission
 Fundamental strength in addressing
complex, integrated problems
 Problems that require the deployment of
interdisciplinary teams of scientists,
development specialists and educators
 Provider of systems solutions through
agroforestry


What is the action and the execution
needed?
 Model the agroecosystem trajectory in the tropical
world into the future – for every significant farming
domain in Africa and throughout the world
 Model the carbon futures scenarios for each
ecosystem, yielding the enterprise portfolios and
their carbon budgets – based on a firm
understanding of the farming systems
 Determine the key actions and investments needed to
realize the favorable carbon futures that are also
most favorable to smallholder poverty alleviation

What Could Be The Overall Flow of
Funds to the Poor from such a Market?
 Carbon sequestration business deals on a
billion hectares of land in the tropics –
 If the investment were to provide
$20 /t C * 2 t C sequestered per hectare for 20
years * 1 billion hectares
 That is $ 40 billion dollars per year for 20
years.


This is equivalent of $ 650 of additional
income per capita for a billion people.
But there would be other benefits as well:
 Vastly increased production and productivity of tree
crops that would earn additional income and improve
household nutrition and food security.
 More productive soils that increase crop production –
directly through increased soil replenishment, reduced
tillage, greater investment in fertilization, and better soil
conservation.
 Enhanced habitat for biodiversity conservation.
 A global landcare ethic
 Boost for global peace and security and multilateralism.

The big question:
How does all this impact on the
development of our focused scientific
agenda?


These developments are consistent with
our Vision of an agroforestry
transformation in the developing world…
Resulting in a massive increase in the use of
working trees on working landscapes by
smallholder rural households that helps ensure
security in food, nutrition, income,
health, shelter and energy, and a regenerated
environment.


Our Mission Goals are consistent with
the integrated approaches needed
1. To develop the role of trees in sound land and farm
management
2. To domesticate and conserve trees and expand
market opportunities for smallholder tree products
3. To develop pro-poor agroforestry strategies that
benefit local people and enhance environmental
services
4. To improve capacities for effective research,
development and education in agroforestry


Our Integrated Frame is cognizant of the various
scales at which solutions are needed:
Four Global Themes
Trees and Markets – the components
Germplasm, products, processing, market chains
Land and People – the household farm system
Assembling the components together into systems
Environmental Services – the landscape effects
Watershed management, biodiversity, climate change
Strengthening Institutions –
Building capacity in research & development


Our role in the CGIAR

1) Active involvement in developing the System
Priority Framework Plans

2) Leadership in Creating New Challenge
Programmes

3) Leadership in implementing the CGIAR Eastern
and Southern Africa Regional Plan for Collective
Action among the Centres

4) Being an effective partner in the Alliance of
CGIAR Centres

Where are we in the process of
developing our new strategic plan?

Scientific Renewal at the World Agroforestry Centre

 We are committed to embracing change in our
organization - starting with our corporate identity as a
science institution.
 We remain committed to our vision of transforming lives
and landscapes.
 We are refreshing our mission to re-emphasize the
science that underpins it.


New draft mission statement
We use science to understand the complex role
of trees in livelihoods and the environment, and
promote use of this knowledge to improve
decisions and practices impacting on the poor.
 Emphasis is on doing science and promoting
knowledge.
 Brings clarity and should connect with all our
stakeholders.
 A single coherent organization (one ICRAF)
that is entirely focused on advancing the
global mission.

 We are placing all of our work in the context
of a few key global problems.
 We are establishing a framework for defining
priorities at all levels - based on four key
criteria: salience or relevance, credibility,
legitimacy, and fundability.
 This framework will guide the decisions we
make about all the work that we pursue.

 We will direct our resource mobilization
efforts in line with these priorities.
 We will direct our strategic policy
engagement only to those key global fora
where agroforestry science has a particularly
critical policy-relevant role to play.


The process and timeline for our new
strategy
 Scientific Renewal Workshop in Sept 2006
laid the groundwork
 The Strategic Alignment Committee has
developed a framework for analysing each
initiative.
 Prospective research areas have been
identified and are being prioritized
 Science Meetings to finalize strategy
(26 February – 2 March)

Issues to be addressed and processes in place

Coherent Proactive Strategic Direction
Where best form can continue to mould itself to goals and purpose


How we’ll make it work
 Setting and sticking to a limited set of
priorities
 Speed up decision-making
 Streamline the execution of decisions
taken
 Regular reviews of all major aspects of
agenda
 Better communications at all levels


What Have We Covered?
 Is something unique happening in the world of
agroforestry right now?
Something profound is happening. And it will change
our role and impact in the world profoundly.
 What does it signify?
We must get on top of this and be the driver, not be
driven.
 How does it impact on the development of our
focused scientific agenda?
It bodes toward a truly integrated agenda, focusing on
really significant global challenges, providing solutions
that work on the ground at the national and local
levels.

What Have We Covered?

 Where are we in the process of developing our
new strategic plan?
Through the leadership of our Strategic Alignment
Committee we are on track to deliver a new and
refreshing strategic plan to our Board in April.
 How we are moving forward?
We are intensively preparing for the key discussions of
the upcoming Science Meetings to bring all staff into a
process that can create One ICRAF, an institution
with focus and impact in the turbulent but high-
opportunity times in the years ahead.


The World Agroforestry Centre
is now being sought out for our science to
tackle enormous global problems

You are needed in this enterprise.
Your passion, your energy, your intellect,
and your sweat.
Which leads me to my very last question –

Will you be on the team to join us in this adventure.
An adventure in
Execution…Achievement…and Excellence?

Futre Of Agroforestry Science Dg Seminar

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