The overall objective of GALILEO is to rely on genuine Multi-Actor Approaches (MAA) to co-develop context-specific, people-centered agroforestry innovations in representative agro-pastoral, agroforestry, and agro-silvo-pastoral systems from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The aim is to promote agroforestry as leverage to significantly improve agricultural, household, and climate change adaptation and mitigation performances and to enhance biodiversity in SSA. We build upon 8 agroforestry Living Labs (LLs: local scale and actors), 4 national and 1 regional Innovation Platforms (IPs), set up across 4 AU SSA countries. Our LLs are set in semi-arid zones of Senegal and Kenya and normally humid but drought-prone zones of Ghana and Cameroon thus comparing and covering a large range of SSA conditions. Through MMA, we co-construct potentially adoptable scenarios ex-ante with Innovator, Target, and Control actors in our LLs, then implement, assess, and compare performances in their pilot plots during the whole project. We use field observations also to calibrate process models, able to simulate under future CC scenarios. After full multi-criteria and trade-off analysis, we finally co-select the most effective scenarios ex-post. We thus rely on transdisciplinary research, providing qualitative and quantitative data on the biophysical, socio-economic, and environmental performances. Such adoptable agroforestry innovations will also enable farmers/pastoralists and stakeholders to diversify their incomes from new agroforestry value chains, of which 2 are GALILEO-original. They will also benefit from carbon farming and payment for ecosystem services opportunities. Through our IPs, we also engage in solid MAA collaborations and policy dialogues to first identify bottlenecks and second elaborate guidelines, and policy recommendations, helping towards strengthening their local innovation ecosystems, under a favorable institutional and policy framework.

The loss and degradation of tropical forest ecosystems and the associated impact on ecosystem services and biodiversity at a range of scales (from local to global) is widely recognised . These changes are anthropogenic, being driven by a range of processes the most important of which are agriculture and timber extraction. Deforestation is linked to human development. Recent evidence shows that development initially improves following deforestation, but then declines due to continuing ecosystem degradation . This shows that sustainable, long-term development is linked to ecosystem health. The forest ecosystems of West Africa epitomise these dependencies. Estimates suggest that about 10 million hectares of forest may have been lost in the 20th Century, and around 80% of the original forest is now a forest-agriculture ecosystem . These ecosystems provide food, fuel, fibre and a range of ecosystem services for over 200 million people. Forest loss and degradation is ongoing, being driven primarily by agricultural expansion and continuing degradation of forest-agriculture ecosystems. These cycles of deforestation and ecosystem degradation undermine rural livelihoods causing poverty , as well as reducing the capacity of forest-agriculture ecosystems to deliver key ecosystems services, such as carbon storage, clean water and biodiversity conservation. There is widespread recognition across the West African region that business-as-usual is not an option, but a more sustainable solution to the development of rural livelihoods is urgently required that simultaneously addresses the issues of rural poverty as well as the protection of ecosystem services and biodiversity. This recognition is fuelling burgeoning governmental, private sector, civil society and community interest in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes. A number of pilot PES projects are developing across the region. The precise focus of these projects varies but all of them aim to establish PES schemes through the development and support of local communities and associated structures, thereby improving rural livelihoods, reducing poverty, and protecting forest-agriculture ecosystems. Despite their evident potential, these pilot projects face a number of challenges. First, there are significant gaps in knowledge and understanding required to underpin any PES scheme. Second, individual PES projects are inevitably rather isolated because there is no mechanism to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience across projects, or access knowledge and experience from outside the region. Addressing both challenges requires a combination of research and capacity building. Our ultimate aim is to develop the knowledge, understanding and capacity to support existing and future PES projects in West Africa that are designed to simultaneously address both issues of rural poverty and ecosystem protection. This will form the basis of a future consortium application to ESPA. We recognise, however, that additional north-south and south links need to be established in order for us to do this, building on existing north-south and south-south collaborations. First, additional north-south links are needed to bring together the required research skills within an inter-disciplinary framework. Second, additional south-south links are needed to share knowledge and experience across pilot PES projects, and to bring in knowledge and experience from outside the region (i.e. Brazil). Our application for a Partnership and Project development Grant is designed to address these needs at a workshop in West Africa that will set the research, capacity building and implementation agenda for the proposed project; establish management structures and develop an impact plan. This will then form the basis of subsequent proposal development.

Agricultural development is a major pathway out of poverty in rural Africa. The cultivation of cash crops for sale alongside subsistence crops helps improve livelihoods and alleviate poverty in rural communities. The productivity of these farming systems relies on services provided by the agro-ecosystem within which they occur. These services include fertile soils, the control of pests and diseases, and crop pollination by wild animals. We know that some agricultural systems can damage these services in the longer-term - soil fertility declines, pest and disease outbreaks become more common, pollination levels are reduced. This means that although rural livelihoods might be improved by agricultural development in the short-term, ecosystem degradation and the associated loss of ecosystem services might threaten these gains in the medium to long-term. Has agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa exceeded the capacity of ecosystems to support it? If so, what implications does this have for poor people in rural communities? Are there pathways rural communities might choose to take that enable them to benefit from agriculture-based livelihoods without risking longer-term ecosystem damage? Answering these questions is currently very difficult because a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between agricultural development, wealth distribution and socio-economic opportunity, governance systems, and ecosystem health is largely lacking for the smallholder farming systems typical of sub-Saharan Africa. There is, therefore, a major research challenge in this area that our proposed project aims to address. We plan to explore the ecosystem limits to poverty alleviation in African forest-agriculture landscapes. Specifically, we plan to focus our work on a cocoa farming landscape in Ghana, and a coffee farming landscape in Ethiopia. Ghana and Ethiopia provide an opportunity to study forest-agriculture ecosystems that have contrasting recent development trajectories, levels of rural poverty and ecosystem health. In Ghana, agricultural development has significantly contributed to improved rural livelihoods but may have pushed forest-agriculture ecosystems beyond their limits; whereas in Ethiopia agricultural development is an important potential pathway out of poverty for the rural poor but it is unlikely to have pushed ecosystems beyond their limits yet. By studying these contrasting situations, we hope to provide the scientific evidence that helps rural communities avoid the potentially detrimental effects of ecosystem degradation and hence have more sustainable livelihoods in the longer-term. To do this, we plan to explore (i) the limits to the services provided by forest-agriculture ecosystems resulting from agricultural expansion and intensification; (ii) the key social processes that maintain forest-agriculture ecosystems within these limits or move them beyond them; (iii) the role poverty plays in the processes that determine whether or not ecosystem limits are reached and exceeded; and whether ecosystem limits in turn affect poverty; and (iv) the potential pathways out of poverty rural communities might take; the potential risks ecosystem limits pose to these pathways; and how communities might act to reduce or minimize these risks.