A Sustainable Integrated Agroforestry System.

Towards the end of 2021 and during the first two months of 2022 a heat wave hit the northeast of Argentina, part of southern Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, after a prolonged drought. The effects were catastrophic for agriculture, biodiversity, and the local economy. Extreme climate events have become globally more common, and this fact has helped create a higher level of public awareness about global warming. All climate adaptation and mitigation strategies with a potential to have global impact are worth disseminating and discussing. For over two decades and a half we have committed heavily in the creation of the integrated agroforestry system we document here. The creation and continued leveraging of the system provide an example that it is possible to recover biodiversity and ecosystem services on lands previously eroded due to highly extractive exploitation without appropriate replenishment. Collaborations with public extension agencies have helped in capacity building and public outreach to show how an economic activity can be strengthen by the recovery of natural complexity. We believe that our project and similar ones should be one type of strategy in the toolkit for meeting the 2030 biodiversity targets, e.g., as discussed in the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 15) Global Biodiversity Framework. This Framework must try to give the world the toolkit to enable the 2050 vision of living in harmony with nature, achieving transformative change across our societies and putting nature on a path to recovery by 2030.