Measuring the effects of agroforestry: can European Agri-Environmental Indicators capture them?

Conference abstract for oral presentation World Congress on Agroforestry (Kigali, Rwanda, 20-24 October 2025) & IALE 2025 (Bratislava, Slovakia, 2-5 September 2025)

Sonja Kay¹, Elias Wodzinowski¹, Rico Hübner², Thomas Domin², Marie Gosme³, Gerry Lawson^4
1 Agroscope, Zurich, Switzerland
_² Deutscher Fachverband für Agroforstwirtschaft (DeFAF), Cottbus, Germany
³ INRAE ABSys, Montpellier, France
⁴ European Agroforestry Federation (EURAF), Montpellier, France

Agroforestry offers considerable potential for improving environmental sustainability and for
mitigating and adapting to climate change. Within the European Union (EU), the effectiveness
of such practices is assessed using agri-environmental indicators (AEIs). AEIs serve as tools
for evaluating the effectiveness of environmental and agricultural policies. For agroforestry to
gain greater awareness and recognition among policymakers and practitioners, its benefits must
be made ‘visible’. This means they must be meaningfully incorporated into these AEI
frameworks or measured using appropriate monitoring systems that also cover small-scale
agroforestry systems.

To this end, we have identified and analysed agroforestry-relevant indicators in five EU legal
frameworks: the 8th Environment Action Programme, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP),
the Framework for the Certification of Carbon Removals, the Soil Monitoring and Resilience
Directive and the Nature Restoration Act. From this analysis, we extracted twelve key
indicators most relevant for capturing agroforestry results at farm and country levels. However,
our study shows that the use of indicators is highly fragmented across countries, sectors, and
legal instruments. Data collection methods vary widely, with most data aggregated at the
national level. While this is useful for national and European policymakers, it limits local
decision-makers and application at the farm level.

As part of the HorizonEurope project “DigitAF,” which focuses on the development of digital
tools for agroforestry, a case study was conducted on a DigitAF pilot farm to investigate how
agroforestry is currently represented in the AEI system. The findings of this study demonstrate
that the practice of agroforestry is not encompassed by the existing indicators, or only to a very
limited extent. It was evident that there were critical gaps in the general availability of data at
the local level, as well as in its granularity. Moreover, the integration of data into existing
databases was only used to a limited extent. Despite the existence of environmental data
available at several levels (e.g., from the Land Parcel Identification System, LPIS), there are
systemic bottlenecks in the utilisation of this data to enhance the visibility of the contributions
of agroforestry.

In light of the aforementioned context, the present study puts forward a series of actionable
recommendations with the aim of enhancing the incorporation of agroforestry within the AEI
framework. These include the improvement of data collection at the plot or farm level, the
harmonisation of indicator and their methodologies across different policy instruments, and the
leveraging of existing environmental databases for more local and practice-relevant reporting.
It is imperative to acknowledge that the environmental and climate benefits of agroforestry can
only be fully realised and communicated if they are visible and quantifiable at the level where
decisions are made.

Greater consideration of agroforestry in the AEI is not only essential for ensuring the
effectiveness of policy, but also to enable land managers to adopt and expand these
multifunctional land use systems and to be informed about their progress.

Image info:
Silvoarable site in Šardice – Czech Republic
by Vandendriessche, Jari (2024)
Full resolution and source to cite: https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13835304