Traditional Knowledge Meets Sustainable Agriculture
Ethnobotany & Climate Action: Our Approach
Our innovative framework places cultural ecosystem services at the heart of climate-smart agriculture, creating systems as diverse as the communities that maintain them.
The AgroForest Project Cultural Ecosystem Services Framework:
Preserves local knowledge while combating climate change
Enhances biodiversity through multi-layered planting strategies
Strengthens community engagement and cultural preservation
Mimics natural systems for resilience
Measurable outcomes of a system’s cultural ecosystem service
By working alongside communities to integrate culturally significant plants with climate-smart techniques, we develop nature-based solutions that sequester carbon, enhance biodiversity, and maintain cultural connections.
Initiatives
Seeds of Resilience: Appalachian Home Gardens as Living Libraries
In the mountain communities of West Virginia, home gardens in these rural communities function as multifaceted resources, providing household food security through locally adapted crop varieties, supporting healthcare through accessible medicinal plant resources, and maintaining cultural continuity through place-based stewardship practices. This research examines these domestic landscapes as sites where heritage varieties coexist with locally adapted wild species, creating unique assemblages of biocultural diversity.
As rural mountain communities navigate environmental and socioeconomic changes, understanding the role of home gardens in maintaining both biological and cultural diversity provides insights into community-based conservation approaches and the adaptive capacity of traditional agroecological systems.
Biocentrism in the Anthropocene: Ethnobotanical Agroforestry in Togo
This research examines agricultural landscapes as sites where traditional ecological knowledge can coexist with climate-smart farming practices, creating opportunities for the conservation of biocultural diversity.
Building upon a decade-long agroforestry system established in Zafi, Togo, which has demonstrated measurable benefits, including enhanced soil organic carbon sequestration, improved water retention, this project integrates community-identified, culturally relevant plant species into an existing system. This research investigates how climate-smart agriculture can be redefined through biocentric worldviews by applying a cultural ecosystem services framework
Insetting Consultation Services
Our consultation services support companies in developing market-based mechanisms for Scope 3 emissions reductions and removals within their value chains, with specialized expertise in agroforestry interventions for coffee and cocoa production systems. Expertise encompasses existing and emerging insetting frameworks, including SustainCERT Intervention Requirements, Verra Scope 3 Requirements, and Social Carbon methodologies.
