Susan Cook-Patton is a Senior Forest Restoration Scientist on the Natural Climate Solutions Science Team at The Nature Conservancy. She works to quantify the climate mitigation potential of reforestation and other natural climate solutions and infuse the best-available science into policy decisions. To do this, she collaborates with scientists across the globe, and from academic, government, and other non-governmental organizations.
She has over a decade of experience leading scientific investigations into how changes in biodiversity and climate are impacting forest, grassland, and urban ecosystems. Before joining the Nature Conservancy in 2016, she was a policy fellow at the US Forest Service and a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. Susan holds a PhD in Community Ecology from Cornell University, and bachelor degrees in Biology, Psychology and English from Indiana University.
Agroforestry as a natural climate solution
S. COOK-PATTON
Restoring tree cover is a prominent climate solution, with the potential to remove gigatonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air. However, achieving this potential will depend on many human decisions about how and where to restore tree cover. In particular, agroforestry is a promising option, given its potential to simultaneously store additional carbon, enhance livelihoods, and support biodiversity. However, substantial uncertainty remains around how much carbon can be captured. One of the central challenges is the sheer diversity of agroforestry practices employed across the globe. Species identity, planting density, and management practices, as well as many other factors, will influence the overall climate mitigation potential of an individual agroforestry system. Although recent reviews have begun to compile carbon sequestration rates and stocks within agroforestry systems, the current evidence base is not fully comprehensive. Individual reviews examine only a subset of the existing literature and typically partition agroforestry systems into coarse categories that do not reflect the diversity of actual on-the-ground practices. As individuals, corporations, and governments decide whether and how to deploy agroforestry as a climate solution during this climate critical decade, there is a strong need for a readily available and comprehensive dataset to better predict climate outcomes across diverse agroforestry systems. We are therefore conducting a systematic review across over 25,000 published studies to find empirical estimates of carbon sequestration rates and stocks in agroforestry systems. To date, we have compiled data from over 1000 papers into a consistent data structure. Our goal is to create a publicly available dataset that can help to accelerate our scientific understanding of the climate mitigation potential of these human-natural ecosystems. Although agroforestry offers high potential as a climate solution, delivering on that promise requires a more precise understanding of how much carbon can be captured, based on the best available data.