Agroforestry as a Potential Measure to Enhance Plant Nutrition and Carbon Sequestration

Agroforestry systems (AFSs) are land management strategies to tackle carbon sink and soil fertility depletion along with other ecosystem services around the globe. Soils are losing their quality due to factors like oxidation of organic matter, washing away of nutrient-rich topsoil with runoff water, poor recycling back of crop residues, repeated and intensive cultivation of crops, etc. AFSs are particularly important for deep capture of nutrients, nutrient cycling, reducing nutrient loss from erosion and leaching, high SOM production and decomposition, and thus, soil fertility improvement and degraded land restoration. AFSs are capable of maintaining a good and diverse consortium of microorganisms, which is again crucial to soil health and its fertility. Soils rich in microflora have significantly higher amounts of organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus than soil with poor microflora. Besides this, agroforestry has gained great recognition for enhancing carbon sinks and reducing CO₂ emissions. It is a potential land-use strategy for increasing and conserving aboveground and soil carbon sequestration. AFSs entrap more carbon from the atmosphere than agricultural crops or pastureland. The tree components in AFSs are potential carbon sinks and can boost the flexibility of the systems to combat the extreme impacts of climate change. AFSs can deposit 0.29–15.21 Mg ha−1 year−1 of carbon yearly. Therefore, AFSs should be popularized and implemented throughout the world to alleviate climate change.