Forests are essential to human survival: they store carbon, control water cycles, and support tremendous biological and cultural diversity. As the world’s largest tropical rainforest, the Amazon is a linchpin of the global climate system and a hotspot of diverse species and livelihoods. Agroforestry is at the heart of a sustainable Amazonian economy. By integrating trees with agricultural crops or animals, agroforestry systems maintain livelihoods and food production while supporting diverse ecological services. Climate change is disrupting Amazonian agroforestry, however, and research and policy are lagging. Specifically, we lack a systematic understanding of climate challenges for Amazonian agroforestry systems and a corresponding evidence-based repertoire of strategies to enhance agroforestry resilience. This project responds to these critical knowledge gaps through transdisciplinary research with Amazonian family farmers, who are already using traditional knowledge and experimentation to adapt to climate disruptions.
We are conducting participatory action-research on climate-resilient agroforestry in partnership with Afro-descendant quilombola communities in the Amazon estuary. In particular, we are exploring climate challenges and adaptations in agroforestry homegardens, which are traditionally managed by women and which support food sovereignty, health, income, and traditional culture. Through co-produced research with the grassroots Vila União/Campina Centre for Quilombola Action and Resistance (NARQ) and the Vila União/Campina quilombola community, this project will identify low-cost technologies to enhance homegarden climate resilience, as well as institutional and policy measures to support small-farmer climate adaptations.
Our project team, which includes members of NARQ and faculty and students at the Federal University of Pará (Brazil), University of Georgia (USA), and University of Oxford, helps lead an international consortium of researchers seeking major external funding for community-based agroforestry and climate research across the lower Amazon. This pump-priming project will demonstrate proof of concept for external funding applications, seeding a research programme that will help to sustain tropical forest ecosystems while building more just and resilient Amazonian futures.
