Overview

Efforts to reverse land landscape restoration in the Eastern Province have been constrained by several problems including dependence on wood as major source of energy, low tree survival rate due to termites, prolonged drought, uncontrolled grazing, fire outbreak and low investment.

The eastern province and peri-urban areas of Kigali City were selected based on criteria including opportunities for restoration, livelihood and carbon benefits, a range of agro-ecological conditions (for example, altitudinal gradient) and sensitivity to climate impacts, degree and intensity of exposure to climate stress, and local adaptive capacity to climate shocks.

Climate-smart agroforestry is one of the solutions to sustainably improve agricultural yields, reverse ecosystems degradation and improve resilience to climate change. Climate-smart agroforestry will address issues like soils that are vulnerable to rapid decomposition of their organic matter and increased loss of nutrients caused by inadequate agricultural practices.

The project will focus on developing incentives for agroforestry adoption and removing barriers to agroforestry technology uptake as well as exploring innovative approaches related to reduced degradation, increased land productivity, improved soil and biomass carbon and improved livelihoods and poverty reduction. In the project, efficient models of improved cooking stoves (ICS) shall be designed and tested for reduced consumption of biomass fuel, which will lead to reduced pressure on tree resources and contribute to sustainable restoration. These actions will help matching the national commitment to land restoration with the required experience and knowledge of climate-smart, locally tailored and viable agroforestry practices to rapidly scale up progress on land restoration and sustainable farmland management.

Overall objective

The main objective of the project is to increase the pace and scale of agroforestry-based restoration of degraded agricultural land and sustainable use of biomass energy, with associated improvements of land health, livelihoods and poverty reduction.

Specific objective

The specific objective of the project is to effectively understand and demonstrate the ecological, social and economic pathways to, and resultant benefits from, the scale up of agroforestry-based restoration and sustainable biomass use in peri-urban Kigali and drylands in the Eastern Province.

Key Outcomes

• Evidence-based knowledge generated on scalable agroforestry systems suited to the Eastern Province and peri-urban areas of Kigali City from an ecological services and socio-economic perspective
• Evidence-based knowledge generated on the further development and diversification of climate resilient, high nutrition value chains in different agroforestry systems.