17.11.2025
How can trees on farmland help make agriculture across Europe more sustainable and resilient to climate change? This question is at the heart of the final conference of the EU project AF4EU (“Agroforestry for Europe”) in Brussels – with active participation of the working group “Farm Economics and Ecosystem Services” from the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF). The EU Parliamentary session was part of the final conference of the EU project AF4EU ‘Think Agroforestry: Enhancing Business Models and Advisory Services’.
Dr. Seyed-Ali Hosseini-Yekani, a senior researcher at ZALF and leader of the subgroup “Model-based analysis of global-local interactions to increase ecosystem services”, presented new
business models that help agroforestry farms become both economically viable and ecologically beneficial – a key requirement for making agroforestry more widespread in Europe. “Agroforestry offers many ecological advantages – such as erosion control, biodiversity and climate resilience – but it will only succeed in practice if it also makes economic sense,” explains Dr. Hosseini-Yekani. Together with his team and two PhD candidates, he is working on innovative modelling approaches to link
farm-level decisions with
macroeconomic impacts, using coupled simulation tools like
MODAM and
CGE. This integrated perspective is currently unique in European agroforestry research.
Project partners in AF4EU include:
- Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
- Fundación Empresa Universidad Gallega (FEUGA)
- Teagasc (Ireland)
- Agricultural University of Athens
- EU4Advice
- COREnet
- ZALF – Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
Funding information: The project is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe.
Further Information:
