Contribution of European Agroforestry Systems to Climate Change Mitigation: Current and Future Land Use Scenarios

Agroforestry is a land use system that has recently been recognised as a strategic tool for greenhouse gas mitigation and as an integrated approach to sustainable land use due to its environmental benefits. Hence, information on its net carbon sequestration potential is crucial for future land use planning and sustainable development. This paper aims to estimate net emissions and removals from silvopastoral and silvoarable systems by quantifying their areas across the EU27, the UK, and Switzerland, utilising the Land-Use-based Integrated Sustainability Assessment land cover map and Copernicus high-resolution layers. The analysis identified a total of 9.2 Mha of silvopastoral and silvoarable areas across the study area, comprising approximately 6 Mha and 3.2 Mha, respectively, mainly clustered around the Mediterranean biogeographical region. Collectively, these land use systems could remove approximately 81.7 Mt of CO2 eq yr&minus:1 while emitting roughly 49.9 Mt CO2 eq yr&minus:1, resulting in a net removal of 31.8 Mt of CO2 eq yr&minus:1. From a global perspective, the EU27 reported 3180.2 Mt of CO2 eq emissions in 2018, with the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector acting as a net sink, removing 260.8 Mt CO2 eq, equivalent to &minus:8.2% of total emissions. Agroforestry, when integrated within the agriculture sector, could further enhance its GHG mitigation, potentially offsetting the sector&rsquo:s emissions by 54%. Additionally, expanding agroforestry systems on 30% of the identified target areas would sequester up to 49 Mt of CO2 eq yr&minus:1 more and result in planting 1.7 billion trees more. These findings highlight the positive role of agroforestry systems in contributing to the EU&rsquo:s 2030 emission reduction and tree planting targets and emphasise the need for integrated management approaches to enhance and maximise their mitigation potential.