Interview with Patrick Worms, International Union of Agroforestry

IUAF, the International Union of Agroforestry, is a membership organization that brings together researchers and practitioners in agroforestry from around the world. The main objective of the union is to convene, every three years, the World Congress on Agroforestry, whose most recent edition was held in Kigali, Rwanda, in October 2025. IUAF was founded at the World Congress on Agroforestry in Montpellier, France, six years ago and operates globally.

I was the president of IUAF until the election of a new board in Kigali last month (the union has statutory term limits for board members, which applied to me). I am now an Ex-Officio Trustee of the Union.

I have been active in agroforestry for 15 years, and previously built up and led EURAF, the European Agroforestry Federation (despite doing most of my work in Africa – I am an employee of ICRAF, the Nairobi-based International Centre for Research in AgroForestry, now known as CIFOR-ICRAF). Discussions on creating an international union started at our World Congress in New Delhi, and we formalised it in Montpellier, where I was elected a Founding Trustee.

Agroforestry is the practice of integrating trees with agricultural systems. It comes in a huge number of varieties, ranging from vast tracts of windbreaks in cereal fields to the highly complex multi-strata production systems common in the tropics through the treed savannas that attract tourists to East Africa.

Its key benefits are that it provides resilience by increasing the number of marketable products coming from a given piece of land, by buffering climate extremes, by enhancing soil fertility and the hydrological cycle, and that it is applicable on almost any agricultural biome on the planet (there are even agroforestry systems that work in commercial greenhouses).

Agroforestry is also the best kind of job: every morning, when I open my laptop, I am more likely than not to come across a paper or finding that I was unfamiliar with. It’s a constant learning experience!

It’s also a land-use practice that combines many of the objectives that farmers and the international community are looking for, from better livelihoods to more resilience, increased biodiversity and, most tantalising of all, the ability to lock down vast quantities of atmospheric carbon in soils through the impact of trees.

Yes, I travel a huge amount. My current projects are in the African Sahel and in southern Africa, I act as an agricultural advisor to the Belgian government at UNCCD meetings, and regularly visit agroforestry events and practitioners – both farmers and ranchers – in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia.

Not really. Obviously, we use AI like everyone else to facilitate our lives and rapidly research unfamiliar topics, but we are very much a people business. We have not yet found effective ways to scale up agroforestry (or indeed any form of regenerative agriculture) through information tech alone.

We will hold our next World Congress in Costa Rica in 2028, and are aggressively developing our ability to communicate with our members, including by providing useful services, such as, for example, helping young researchers from southern countries link up with one another and find funding to pursue their studies.

Transforming the way humans use the land to produce the food, fibre and energy they require is a never-ending job, so the likelihood that we would manage to transform agriculture at scale around the world in the next few years is zero. I really don’t see myself doing anything else with my life!