Transform farms to meet biodiversity goals

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

Two weeks of global biodiversity negotiations concluded last week at the United Nations Environment Programme headquarters in Nairobi, where delegates considered the first global assessment of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework implementation progress, and the findings were an uncomfortable truth.

Drawing on 129 national reports and nearly 90 national biodiversity strategies, the assessment found that of the Framework's 23 targets, only one, on building resilience to climate change, showed measurable progress, and even that was moving too slowly. It also emerged that $200 billion a year by 2030 finance meant to flow toward biodiversity remains a fraction of what was pledged.

With only four years remaining and crucial decisions expected at COP17 in Yerevan, Armenia this October, the gap between international ambition and action is becoming impossible to ignore, particularly in one place that remains too easily overlooked in global biodiversity discussions: the farm.

Across East Africa, biodiversity loss is evident in shrinking tree cover, soils depleted by years of continuous cropping and the disappearance of pollinators from landscapes dominated by a single crop. Yet farms are not only where biodiversity is being lost, but they are also where much of that damage can be reversed.

For more than four decades, Vi Agroforestry has worked with farming families and farmer organisations in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, connecting biodiversity conservation with resilient livelihoods, food security and gender equality. This experience offers a lesson that biodiversity targets will not be achieved solely through top-down decisions, but through action on the millions of smallholder farms that shape much of sub-Saharan Africa’s landscape.

This means that agroforestry must be central to biodiversity transformation. Biodiversity is a deliberate farming strategy that integrates locally suitable trees with crops and livestock to improve soil fertility and nutrient cycling, increase water infiltration and retention, provide fodder and shade, and create habitats for birds, insects and other wildlife. By reconnecting fragmented ecosystems, agroforestry can support biodiversity while sustaining food production and household incomes.

We see this potential around Mount Elgon, where Vi Agroforestry works with about 15,000 smallholder farmers, and in the Serengeti–Mara ecosystem, where our programmes support farmers and pastoralists to produce food while coexisting with wildlife.

Restore degraded ecosystems

Although the Global Biodiversity Framework recognises the need to restore degraded ecosystems, reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint and ensure the participation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, it is yet to produce the deliberate transfer of finance, technical support and decision-making power required by the people managing the land.

Too much biodiversity funding is designed around governments and large conservation projects, while too little reaches farmer organisations operating at the scale the crisis demands.

Closing this gap requires three important shifts, beginning with national biodiversity and climate strategies recognising agroforestry and farmer-led restoration as legitimate, fundable pathways for achieving ecosystem-restoration targets, rather than treating them as afterthoughts to the expansion of protected areas.

Biodiversity finance must also become directly accessible to farmer organisations, accompanied by the technical assistance they need to secure and manage it. Routing most resources through governments and international agencies can slow implementation and distance funding from the land where results must be delivered.

The third shift must place women at the centre of decision-making. Women carry out much of East Africa’s agricultural work, yet many lack secure land rights, access to finance and influence over how land is used. Our experience shows that programmes work best when women help decide what is planted and how the resulting income is used, which is why their leadership must be built into programme design rather than added later as an inclusion requirement.

Recognising the importance of farms does not diminish the value of protected areas, ambitious national targets or international diplomacy. However, conservation centred mainly on land set aside by governments will fall short if it neglects the land that farmers cultivate every day.

With the 2030 deadline too close for incremental change, implementation must now reach the farms where biodiversity is either restored or lost with every planting season. The encouraging thing is that farmers across East Africa are already demonstrating that productive agriculture and healthy ecosystems can coexist, and policy and finance must now enable them to do so at the scale the biodiversity crisis demands.

Reporting originally appeared via Nation Africa. Read the full source for additional context.