Bringing more trees into farmed landscapes will make them more resilient economically and environmentally. Trees on farms combine productivity with support for biodiversity, increasing the carbon stored in the land and helping us meet our commitments on climate and nature. Agroforestry (significantly increasing the number of trees we incorporate into farming systems) can help deliver nature and climate goals while continuing to support agricultural production and other services that we need from the land. Research presented in this report makes clear that widespread adoption of agroforestry can enhance and connect habitats and help store more carbon in our landscapes, while maintaining food production and in some cases improving farm productivity in both arable and pastoral farming systems

Agroforestry is an integrated land use management that combines a woody component with a lower story agricultural production recognized as one of the most important tools to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The objective of this paper is to provide a categorization and extent of agroforestry practices linked to agricultural and forest lands at regional level and evaluate how are they promoted by the previous (2007–2013) and current CAP (2014–2020) with a special focus on climate change mitigation potential. Agroforestry occupies almost 20 million hectares in Europe, being silvopasture and homegardens the most extensively spread practices and forest farming not quantified. Agroforestry practices are promoted at European level but in a really complex form as more than 25 measures are implemented to enhance the existing 5 agroforestry practices (silvopasture, silvoarable, riparian buffer strips, forest farming and homegardens). Simplification of the number of measures to promote agroforestry practices is needed to better follow up the implementation and to evaluate and provide future policies more adapted at European levels. Huge potential climate change mitigation options should be focused on the use of silvopasture on forest lands to reduce forest fires and to increase the presence of the woody component on arable lands (silvoarable) but also on the promotion of forest farming and homegardens as forms to increase the use of short supply chains and to increase the connection of urban, periurban and rural areas within a bioeconomy and circular economy framework.

There is increasing interest to combine adaptation and mitigation measures that provide win–win solutions to climate change. Agroforestry systems offer compelling synergies between adaptation and mitigation. This article reviews the empirical evidence from various studies on how trees and agroforestry systems enhance smallholders' capacity to adapt to climate risks. Agroforestry systems improve resilience of smallholder farmers through more efficient water utilization, improved microclimate, enhanced soil productivity and nutrient cycling, control of pests and diseases, improved farm productivity, and diversified and increased farm income while at the same time sequestering carbon. Although these seems very promising, tradeoffs may arise both at the farm and landscape scales

Climate change and extreme weather events are threatening agricultural production worldwide. The anticipated increase in atmospheric temperature may reduce the potential yield of cultivated crops. Agroforestry is regarded as a climate-resilient system that is profitable, sustainable, and adaptable, and has strong potential to sequester atmospheric carbon. Agroforestry practices enhance agroecosystems’ resilience against adverse weather conditions via moderating extreme temperature fluctuations, provisioning buffers during heavy rainfall events, mitigating drought periods, and safeguarding land resources from cyclones and tsunamis-type events. Therefore, it was essential to comprehensively analyze and discuss the role of agroforestry in providing resilience during extreme weather situations. We hypothesized that integrating trees in to the agro-ecosystems could increase the resilience of crops against extreme weather events. The available literature showed that the over-story tree shade moderates the severe temperature (2–4°C) effects on understory crops, particularly in the wheat and coffee-based agroforestry as well as in the forage and livestock-based silvipasture systems. Studies have shown that intense rainstorms can harm agricultural production (40–70%) and cause waterlogging. The farmlands with agroforestry have been reported to be more resilient to heavy rainfall because of the decrease in runoff (20–50%) and increase in soil water infiltration. Studies have also suggested that drought-induced low rainfall damages many crops, but integrating trees can improve microclimate and maintain crop yield by providing shade, windshield, and prolonged soil moisture retention. The meta-analysis revealed that tree shelterbelts could mitigate the effects of high water and wind speeds associated with cyclones and tsunamis by creating a vegetation bio-shield along the coastlines. In general, existing literature indicates that implementing and designing agroforestry practices increases resilience of agronomic crops to extreme weather conditions increasing crop yield by 5–15%. Moreover, despite its widely recognized advantages in terms of resilience to extreme weather, the systematic documentation of agroforestry advantages is currently insufficient on a global scale. Consequently, we provide a synthesis of the existing data and its analysis to draw reasonable conclusions that can aid in the development of suitable strategies to achieve the worldwide goal of adapting to and mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change.