Not all agroforestry projects are funded equally, suggests a new comment paper published in Nature Climate Change. Integrating crops into existing forests is an often overlooked agroforestry method to store carbon while creating sustainable livelihoods, according to the authors. The article, published in late May, draws on literature and real-world examples of the lesser-known practice of mixing crops with standing trees. The authors define two categories of methods as “forest-based” versus “field-based” agroforestry. Forest-based refers to integrating crops into existing forests and ecosystems, whereas field-based refers to adding trees to pasturelands or croplands. The latter is not only much more common, but also much better funded, the authors report, in part because of misconceptions that forest-based methods lead to deforestation. While this is sometimes true in tropical environments with crops like coffee or cacao, forest-based agroforestry can actually help restore temperate ecosystems, the authors say. “You have to think differently about tropical and temperate forests,” said Karam Sheban, the lead author and an agroforestry doctoral candidate at the Yale School of the Environment and New York Botanical Garden. “We can’t just export this idea we have about cutting down rainforest to grow coffee into temperate systems.” The agroforestry gap For Sheban, who has worked in temperate agroforestry systems for a decade, it was obvious that there was a bias toward field-based agroforestry from the very beginning of his career. Straight out of college, he volunteered for AmeriCorps with the NGO Rural Action in Ohio’s Appalachian region, where communities used agroforestry…This article was originally published on Mongabay