In the mid-1980s the landscape of Shinyanga region in Western Tanzania was declared the desert of Tanzania by the late President Mwl. Julius K Nyerere due to severe deforestation and degradation. The region covers 5.4% of the total land area in Tanzania and carries over 20% of the ruminant national herd making it the most overstocked region in the country (MLD 2005). The inhabitants mainly of the Wasukuma ethnic group are agro-pastoralists and over 80% of the population derive their livelihoods from livestock kept on extensive grazing systems. The region is semi-arid with erratic unimodal rainfall of 600 to 800mm. The severity of the land degradation problem brought national and international development agencies to implement a long term natural resource management programme, which was launched in 1986 with a major thrust on afforestation and agroforestry. Successes have been recorded and the biggest of them was in blending local knowledge and modern science to reclaim degraded land and generate various socio-economic and environmental benefits (Monela 2004). Revival of Ngitili the traditional land use system in which large areas of land are set aside by communities and individuals to ensure that forage is available in the dry season was used to rest the land and introduce interventions that increased tree density, vegetation cover, soil productivity and consequently more biomass production (Barrow and Mulenge 2003; Monela 2004). In 2002 these initiatives received international recognition by the UN Equator Prize 2002 for the outstanding local efforts for poverty reduction and environment conservation. A major criticism has been lack of baseline data for a more objective assessment of the impact. Furthermore emerging global challenges of climate vulnerability and poverty reported by the three major global studies i.e. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, Mapping vulnerability and poverty in Africa, the United Nations Livestock long shadow and more recently the Stern Review on economics of climate change give such initiatives new dimensions. The livestock sector is in the spotlight again as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. In the global warming context livestock is more damaging than all the vehicles in the world and also a major source of land and water degradation (FAO 2006). The sector accounts for 9, 37, 65 and 64 percent of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia global emissions, respectively. The largest share of emissions come from extensive systems, where poor livestock keepers, >100 million in East and Southern Africa, extract marginal livelihoods from dwindling natural resources and have a very low capacity to invest in change. Recent developments in agroforestry science provide adaptation/mitigation options that can reduce or reverse adverse effects of this livestockpovertyenvironment enigma. In this presentation we assess one of the agroforestry – livestock innovations introduced by the project in relation to dry season climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.