Carbon sequestration potential in agroforestry system in India: an analysis for carbon project

Abstract

India is a large developing country with more than seventy per cent population earning their livelihood from diverse land use activities. Changing climate is a worry for the nation but the country cannot afford to slow down the developing/developmental activities. Landuse activities in irrigated agro-ecosystems have started shifting from traditional agriculture to smart agriculture to meet the country's food requirements and secure livelihood security. But this shift has been achieved at the cost of natural resources and degradation of environment. Realizing the benefits of climate smart agriculture in the changing scenario, farmers are adapting slowly to it but appropriate details of climate vulnerability and package of climate smart agriculture including tree-crop interaction are very limited for adoption. It is important to assess the strengths and weaknesses of carbon sequestration (CS) projects with respect to their practical potential rather than biophysical potential for registration under clean development mechanism for additional income. There is a need to address the technical, economic, legal and social issues of the adopters because they have to lock their land for long time for CS projects, therefore confidence building measures are essentially required to make them aware/motivate for adoption of trees on their farms for mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and adaptation against changing climate. However, the potential of agroforestry (AF) systems has not been reflected in registration of CS projects due to lack of best practices in AF, procedures and methodologies for carbon accounting, etc., which requires thorough review to develop appropriate models for payments of environmental benefits. Poplar based AF has been considered here as an example to understand the process of accounting CS and its practical applicability for environmental payments.

Effects of tree fostering on soil health and microbial biomass under different land use systems in the Central Himalayas

“…Tree-based land use systems are close to natural ecosystems as they provide ecosystem services similar to the forest such as the biodiversity, provision of food stuff, water resource, climate regulation, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, primary production of oxygen, soil formation, recreation, and culture (Sharma, Chauhan, & Tripathi, 2016).…”

Institutional Perspectives of Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In terms of geographic coverage, India was the most represented country in the CSA literature, with 13 publications [36][37][38][39][40][41], followed by Tanzania (n = 10) [42][43][44][45], Germany (n = 8) [46][47][48] and Malawi (n = 7) [49][50][51] (see Figure S2 for the distribution of the CSA related publication across countries). Some publications however, did not make specific reference to a country or region (n = 21) and provided generic conceptual development [11,52,53].…”

Calidad de Andosols en sistemas forestal, agroforestal y agrícola con diferentes manejos en Zacatlán, Puebla

“…Sin embargo, hay que indicar que del bosque nativo a los sistemas agroforestales, el contenido de MOS continua siendo alto (más de 13%) de acuerdo con la escala de Brady y Weil (1999). Otros autores mencionan que a pesar de que el reemplazo de los bosques por sistemas agroforestales reduce el contenido de MOS, este tipo de sistemas ofrecerá mejores opciones de almacenamiento de carbono que las tierras agrícolas intensamente cultivadas (Nair et al, 2009;Sharma et al, 2016). La relación C:N presente en todos los sitios de estudio fue variable de acuerdo con el bosque y con el tipo de manejo del suelo.…”