Silvopasture’s Climate Adaptation, Mitigation, and Economic Gains

As the effects of climate change become increasingly evident, innovative solutions are essential for creating a sustainable future.

Silvopasture is an effective approach to tackle pressing challenges. The Eastern United States has assessed its climate adaptation, mitigation, and economic potential. How effective is it, as implementers claim?

By integrating trees with livestock and forage, this method not only significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions but also enhances soil health and promotes biodiversity.

Understanding how silvopasture works and its myriad benefits can pave the way for more resilient agricultural practices and a healthier planet. Read on to discover the transformative potential of this environmentally friendly practice.

Silvopasture, as an agroforestry system, is not new and has been implemented in regions such as Latin America, where evidence shows it can increase both carbon storage and livestock productivity. Because of this positive outcome, the practice is promoted in the United States, particularly in the eastern and wetter parts of the country, where forests are historically abundant, support greater livestock production, and offer high potential for silvopasture implementation.

A 2023 study, “Silvopasture offers climate change mitigation and profit potential for farmers in the eastern United States,” conducted in the eastern US, analysing the climate mitigation and profit potential of silvopasture for farmers, finds that silvopasture can expand by 5.6 to 25.3 million hectares, with a potential to capture 4.9 to 25.6 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year, depending on the plant species – fodder or tree species.

In terms of profitability, the study also finds that silvopasture can be profitable, generating an internal rate of return (IRR) of 6-14% without a carbon price. However, a higher carbon price could drive farmers to invest more seriously in large, long-lived trees, such as timber and nut-based silvopasture.

The study concludes that “future work is needed to fully incorporate additional considerations, like loss of grazing use during establishment, shade-induced effects on forage production, and livestock productivity. Furthermore, specific economic, ecological, site- and operation-level considerations are critical to evaluate the appropriateness of silvopasture systems for a given setting.”

WRI’s working paper reviews evidence on silvopasture’s claims to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining animal yields, and explores strategies that could make this realistic in the eastern United States, where it supports more than half of the country’s grazing cattle.

Despite assertions that silvopasture offers benefits for climate change adaptation and mitigation, its adoption is still very low. This is largely due to insufficient evidence supporting these claims and to trade-offs between land use and animal productivity.

A paper by WRI specifically examines whether introducing trees into pasturelands in the eastern United States could significantly reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions while still maintaining animal yields. It also explores realistic strategies for achieving this goal.

The paper presents a “rapid, narrative umbrella review” of the existing review-level literature. The researchers conducted this review by searching for quantitative syntheses (i.e., meta-analyses) published before April 1, 2025. They utilised Google Scholar and EBSCO Discovery Service to search for keywords and phrases related to silvopasture, such as agroforestry, agrisilvopasture, biomass, and carbon sequestration.

In their search, the researchers identified 10 quantitative syntheses examining the effects of transitioning from pasture or grassland to silvopasture. These syntheses evaluated one or more of the following three effects: soil carbon stocks, biomass carbon stocks, and forage or animal productivity.

The WRI paper finds that overall, the evidence from existing research:

“does not yet support expectations of large, reliable climate change mitigation benefits from converting pastureland to silvopasture at scale in the eastern United States. The primary challenge is that temperate silvopasture systems tend to reduce livestock production versus treeless pastures. Although over-yielding from livestock and tree products seems possible or even likely, the practical and economic challenges of entering a second market are formidable, and the climate benefits of planting trees on pastureland are likely to be somewhat offset by the climate costs of thinning trees for silvopasture. The opportunity justifies more analyses and pilot studies, but market opportunities alone are likely to limit practical options. Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that landowners are more likely today to convert forests to silvopasture by clearing trees than by planting trees in open pasture. Silvopasture may still have a role in climate adaptation by reducing heat stress for livestock and providing additional co-benefits such as improved water regulation and reduced soil erosion.”