Carbon farming research in Indian agroforestry systems: a review of thematic patterns and taxonomic gaps

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Identifies under-researched areas in carbon farming, particularly taxonomic classification and biodiversity integration.

🏛政策担当者:Useful for aligning research priorities with national climate targets and carbon credit methodologies.

Carbon farming through agroforestry systems represents a potentially important strategy for climate change mitigation, agrobiodiversity management, and sustainable land use. India, despite its ambitious climate commitments, lacks systematic assessments of how its carbon farming research compares to global literature, particularly in terms of practice coverage and taxonomic representation. This study presents a systematic bibliometric and thematic review of carbon farming research in Indian and global agroforestry contexts, using the PRISMA 2020 guidelines and the Scopus database (inception to December 2025), resulted in 59 Indian and 532 global studies. Thematic frequency analysis examines publication trends, practice-specific coverage, and taxonomic system representation across five carbon farming practices (agroforestry, conservation tillage, biochar application, crop-livestock management, and rotational sowing) and three agroforestry taxonomic groups. The results show that Indian carbon farming research has grown rapidly (630% increase post-2020). Indian publications show disproportionately high coverage of biochar (4.3 times the global share) and soil health (13.7 percentage points above the global share), consistent with national land-use pressures and policy incentives. Key research gaps include the near absence of taxonomic system classification in Indian studies, underrepresentation of crop-livestock management (8.5% vs. 11.7% globally), and lower coverage of biodiversity (6.9 percentage point gap) and long-term sustainability themes (8.3 percentage point gap). These patterns reflect research focus, not necessarily on-ground ecological outcomes. Addressing these gaps through improved system-level classification and integrated monitoring frameworks would strengthen India’s capacity for evidence-based carbon farming research and policy alignment.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-026-01575-8first seen 2026-07-13 05:03:21