Agro-Forestry Programme
Agro-Forestry for Sustainable Livelihood, Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation
Agro-forestry is an important strategy adopted by Green Yatra towards sustainable land-agriculture management, strengthening the flow of ecosystem services, ensuring food and nutritional security, and enhancing livelihoods. It is aligned to the national and global priorities provides an excellent opportunity to achieve multiple benefits with less investments and achievement of many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Benefits of Agro-Forestry System:
Growing trees outside forests such as homesteads, inter-cropping on farm lands, farm bunds, uplands not suitable for agriculture, unutilized land, roadside and river banks etc. provide multiple benefits as shown in the diagram. Hence, its value is immense in terms of poverty reduction, rural prosperity and economic development, creation of jobs, ecological enrichment and more ever, creation of a sustainable future.
The Need
In India, more than 700 million people in rural and tribal areas are dependent on forestry and agriculture for their livelihoods and sustenance. Only about a small percentage of them have access to irrigation. Agro-Forestry is a solution to many of the issues faced by the rural agrarian system such as low land holding, low productivity, poor soil quality, low soil-moisture retention capacity, severe impact of climate change, increasing population and growing demand for food and cash.
India’s goal under the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3.0 billion tons of carbon dioxide–equivalent (gigatons [Gt] CO2e) by 2030 through improved forest and tree cover. Hence, Agro-forestry can play a role to meet this national goal.
Green Yatra Achievements
Green Yatra has been working among the small scale farmers to promote livelihood plantations since its inception in 2010. It has supported more than 10,000 farmers in several states of India. Our livelihood plantations have been very successful and benefitted the farmers in terms of increased income, access to long term food security, enhanced climate resilience and carbon sequestration.
We develop solutions and innovative models as per the needs of community and local conditions of different agro-ecological contexts.