Lead image for Transform farms to meet biodiversity goals .
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.