Polycultural food production in temperate woodlands: Multifactorial benefits and political-economic barriers

Steffen Hirth, Ivan Drlička, Matthew Paterson and Paul W. Thomas

Land Use Policy, 2025, vol. 156, issue C

Abstract: Given the need to produce sufficient food while meeting net zero targets and protecting biodiversity, there is renewed impetus to expand woodland-based food systems in the Global North, including agroforestry and forest gardening. Typically, however, agriculture, forestry, and conservation are separated spatially, as well as conceptually, and afforestation policies insufficiently consider the integration of edibles into forest management, or woody species into agriculture. We review the scientific evidence on the benefits of woodland-based food systems in temperate climates in relation to four aspects: climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity restoration, food production, and social benefits. Findings suggest high potential of enhancing ecological and cultural ecosystem services through woody polyculture. However, an analysis of barriers and enablers of woodland-based food systems also shows that the productivist and monocultural approaches dominating agriculture in and for the Global North are a barrier to transforming the agri-food system towards more complex polycultural systems with woody species. Therefore, we discuss the conditions for making woody polyculture viable, upscaling these systems, and yielding multifactorial benefits at large-scale in relation to the wider political economy. We conclude that significant transformational rather than incremental shifts are needed, most notably regarding the practical and financial valuation of ecosystem services.

Keywords: Agroforestry; Forest gardening; Carbon sequestration; Biodiversity conservation; Food production; Food security; Ecosystem services; Political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837725001541
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:156:y:2025:i:c:s0264837725001541

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107620

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().