Agroforestry to Sustain Island and Coastal Agriculture in the Scenario of Climate Change: Indian Perspective

There is about 620,000 km of coastline in the world, and over one-third of the total human population lives within 100 km of an oceanic coast. Though it has not been possible to come up with the exact number of islands, there are around 2000 islands in oceans in the world. India has a total coastline of 7516.6 km, out of which mainland coastline consists of 6100 km and islands’ coastline consists of 1197 km. Indian coastline touches nine states and four union territories. In the scenario of climate change, these areas are vulnerable to frequent natural disasters such as cyclones and tsunamis. Waterlogging and soil salinity are serious threats to the sustainability of rainfed agriculture due to seawater inundation and intensive monsoon rainfall. Agroforestry land use systems have huge potential for sustainable agricultural production and livelihood security in these regions. The island and coastal regions are often described as the cradle of agroforestry in recognition of their long history of numerous traditional practices under diverse agroecological conditions which are based on indigenous knowledge preserved through time immemorial. Plantation-based multi-storied integrated cropping systems, homegardens, farming in forests, fodder farming on neglected coconut plantations, multipurpose trees and shrubs on farmlands, site-specific systems for saline and waterlogged conditions, aquaculture in combination with forest and fruit trees or multi-enterprise agriculture or keeping mangroves intact, alley cropping, and mangrove plantations to protect coastlines are some prominent potential agroforestry systems which have been discussed in this chapter. Besides adopting these anecdotal and modern time-tested systems, modern technologies such as land shaping for multi-enterprise agriculture, domestication of halophytes in highly saline areas, alley cropping on sloping lands and site-specific research-oriented systems have great potential to address the current environmental challenges.