Collaboratrici e collaboratori

In Switzerland - as in many other European countries - Agroforestry systems are long-term investments for farmers. The woody component provides income earliest after 5 years from a continuous fruit or energy production and latest after 30 or 100 years when timber is harvested in Europe. To guarantee a sustainable and resilient production over this whole period requires bold and farsighted decisions considering legal framework and markets as well as changing climate conditions. While the markets are almost unpredictable, and changes occur rapidly; climate can be modelled and projected. For example, the Swiss National Centre for Climate Services (CH2018) predicts temperature rise in summer of 2.5 to 4.5 °C and a decrease of precipitation of 10 % to 25 %. The growing season will be prolonged, but it will become drier. While these conditions will restrict the present agricultural production, they will also allow new crops and tree species to flourish. Based on previous studies listing existing and optional European agroforestry practices, we evaluated the future suitability of agroforestry candidates for the Swiss plateau region. This region spreads out from Lake Geneva to Lake Constance within an altitude below 600 m. Around half of the areas is used by agriculture, mainly arable land, which offers good conditions to establish agroforestry practices. Against this background, we first checked the suitability of the “existing European agroforestry practices” for Swiss future climate conditions. Although there are several future possibilities, not all of them are feasible and legally authorised. Therefore, we evaluated in a second step the conformity of the first selection within the current Swiss legal framework. From the 64 agroforestry candidates proposed by Kay et al. (2019) for Europe, we selected 12 silvoarable systems that are not currently grown in Switzerland, but only in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Steppic regions and evaluated their potential for growing under current and future climate conditions as well as the conformity to Swiss legal framework. Three candidates are recommended for a growing and testing phase in the Swiss plateau. Five practices are classified as “constricted” as either temperature or water supply might not adequately fit the growing requirements. For these propositions an individual check of the local conditions is recommended. Four candidates are inadvisable; three if them are not conform to the Swiss legal framework. We crosschecked our results with farmers, local stakeholders, and horticultural specialists. They confirmed that almonds and olives could already be grown in (home) gardens and parks in Switzerland. Besides that, they pointed out that farmers, mainly due to legal limitations, do not yet use hedges (or fodder trees). In conclusion, forward-looking agricultural management builds on a collection of multiple information and (hopefully) results in a diversity of suitable opportunities. Our list presents a first idea of additional propositions for Swiss farmers to established climate resilient agroforestry – already at present.