Climate-smart sustainable agriculture in low-to-intermediate shade agroforests

Meeting demands for agricultural production while maintaining ecosystem services, mitigating and adapting to climate change and conserving biodiversity will be a defining challenge of this century. Crop production in agroforests is being widely implemented with the expectation that it can simultaneously meet each of these goals. But trade-offs are inherent to agroforestry and so unless implemented with levels of canopy cover that optimize these trade-offs, this effort in climate-smart, sustainable intensification may simply compromise both production and ecosystem services. By combining simultaneous measurements of production, soil fertility, disease, climate variables, carbon storage and species diversity along a shade-tree cover gradient, here we show that low-to-intermediate shade cocoa agroforests in West Africa do not compromise production, while creating benefits for climate adaptation, climate mitigation and biodiversity. As shade-tree cover increases above approximately 30%, agroforests become increasingly less likely to generate win–win scenarios. Our results demonstrate that agroforests cannot simultaneously maximize production, climate and sustainability goals but might optimise the trade-off between these goals at low-to-intermediate levels of cover.