Abstract:

The increased climate variability associated with changing climate patterns is not only aggravating the challenges that farmers are already facing, but also putting people in new situations never faced before. Agroforestry diversifies the environmental and economic functions of small scale farming systems, and is therefore considered more resilient than monocropping to external stress. Up to now most agroforestry research has focused on technical aspects of the systems and while research from the Asian uplands show that agroforestry is environmentally suitable, it is not yet economically attractive for farmers. Moreover, agroforestry research tends to focus on the farm level while there are few studies on the suitability of agroforestry for different agroecological zones.

This paper presents the negative impacts of climate variability on agriculture in two most vulnerable agro-ecological zones, including the central coastal zone versus the Northwest uplands of Vietnam. A novel approach for sustainable development of agroforestry system as one of the most promising options to these negative impacts in the Northwest uplands is also presented. The agroforestry systems developed to address the needs for both environmentally and economically viable diversification and that is resilient to climate stress is done through participatory design (i) where local and scientific knowledge is used to identify the desired species to be added to or improved in existing farming systems, (ii) where farmers and scientists develop indicators to evaluate the systems, and (iii) where scientific experiences are combined with the most sensitive indicators for scaling up the successful agroforestry systems in the zones where they have social acceptance and economic and environmental potential.