Ecosystem services have increasingly been highlighted as central to human wellbeing1,2,3. Ecosystem services refer to the various benefits that humans gain from nature and functioning ecosystems. Four groups of ecosystem services are commonly recognized: provisioning (e.g. food, drinking water, fibre), regulating (e.g. climate, disease control, flood prevention, waste-water self-cleaning), supporting (e.g. nutrient cycling, crop pollination, maintenance of genetic diversity), and cultural (e.g. recreation, spiritual)4 services.

Getting agroforestry on negotiation tables where global, regional, national and local policy responses to current ‘issues’ are discussed takes patience and time. Yet, without such investment, flexibility in the language to be used, and persistence and consensus on the core aspects, agroforestry practitioners will continue to face hurdles because policy documents don’t refer to it as a potential contribution.

Water has been explicitly (or sometimes implicitly in its climate relationships) discussed in nearly all preceding chapters. Water links the plot, landscape and governance scales of the three agroforestry concepts (Chapter 1), it is a key determinant of tree growth and adaptations (Chapter 2), relevant traits can be a target of tree domestication (Chapter 3); water is an important component of soils (Chapter 4) and treesoil-crop interactions (Chapter 5).

According to the 1994 Cameroonian Forest Law, community forests refers to “…part of nonpermanent forest estate (not more than 5000ha) that is the object of an agreement between government and a community in which communities undertake sustainable forest management for a period of 25 years renewable”2. In order for a community forest to be granted communities have to fulfil the following obligations:

A common definition of a disaster is: “a sudden, calamitous event that seriously disrupts the functioning of a community or society and causes human, material, and economic or environmental losses that exceed the community’s or society’s ability to cope using its own resources. Though often caused by nature, disasters can have human origins.” Disasters can be of many types, based on the elements (Earth, Water, Wind, Fire and Biota) involved, the spatial and temporal scale affected and the degree to which they are natural or (partially) manmade.

Small islands exist in a wide range of absolute sizes, making counts of the total number of small islands that exist in the world uncertain. Indonesia, for example, is said to have more than 17 thousand islands, but although some of these are among the largest in the world (Borneo, Papua, Sumatra), it is not clear how many are classified as ‘small’. A relevant distinction exists between those that are permanently inhabited and those that are not, but that criterion has borderline cases as well.