Through the strategic planning process, the World Agroforestry Centre identified three key priorities to frame its research-for-development agenda. These priorities are:
- Agroforestry for livelihoods: Research to address livelihood impacts of agroforestry innovations, smallholder-farm household constraints with access to quality tree germplasm, integration and management of trees on-farm, and market value chains for tree products (linked to MDG1 and MDG6).
- Agroforestry and environment: Research to address tradeoffs in degradation avoidance and land rehabilitation, foster adaptation to climate change, enhance the role of agroforests in maintaining ecosystem services, and negotiation support systems (linked to MDG7).
- Agroforestry and institutions: Research to address the apparent disconnect between local knowledge, policy and science, differences in knowledge and level of information, link multiple ways of learning, insufficiency of approaches and methods to handle the management and integration of knowledge, and the disconnect between agriculture and forestry institutions (linked to MDG2 and MDG8).
Global research priorities are:
- Domestication, utilization and conservation of superior agroforestry germplasm;
- Maximizing on-farm productivity of trees and agroforestry systems;
- Improving tree product marketing for smallholders;
- Reducing risks to land health and targeting agroforestry interventions to enhance land productivity;
- Improving the ability of farmers, ecosystems and governments to cope with climate change;
- Developing policies and incentives for multifunctional landscapes with trees that provide environmental services











