Household livelihood improvements through agroforestry under climate variability in semi-arid Indonesia

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

🔬研究者:Provides empirical evidence on agroforestry's pathway-specific impacts on livelihoods, useful for climate adaptation research.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights for designing agroforestry projects that enhance ecological functions and rural connectivity.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for policies that support adaptive responses and infrastructure in dryland regions.

Agroforestry is widely promoted as a nature-based solution for enhancing rural resilience under climate change, yet empirical evidence on its relationship with livelihood outcomes across multiple dimensions remains limited, particularly in semi-arid regions. This study examines the association between agroforestry characteristics and household livelihood outcomes through ecological, economic, social, and physical pathways under climate variability in semi-arid eastern Indonesia. Using household survey data from 122 agroforestry households in Sumba Barat Daya, we constructed composite indices of perceived climate variability and multidimensional livelihood outcomes and applied pathway-specific OLS models with HC3-robust standard errors, complemented by a bootstrap-based decomposition of pathway contributions. The results indicate that agroforestry characteristics are positively associated with ecological improvement (coef = 0.1672, p < 0.01), representing the dominant pathway linked to overall livelihood outcomes within the analytical framework and further supported by a significant pathway contribution (4.06, 95% CI 2.60–5.53). Economic outcomes are not directly associated with agroforestry characteristics but are positively associated with perceived climate variability (coef = 0.2151, p < 0.01), suggesting that households experiencing higher perceived variability may engage in adaptive livelihood responses. In contrast, social and physical pathways exhibit limited statistical influence, reflecting contextual constraints related to social homogeneity and uniformly poor infrastructure. These findings highlight the importance of understanding agroforestry as a pathway-based socio-ecological adaptation strategy rather than a uniform livelihood intervention. Policies that build on farmers’ existing adaptive responses while strengthening ecological functions, extension services, and rural connectivity are more likely to support more resilient livelihood outcomes in climate-stressed dryland regions.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04054-3first seen 2026-08-13 04:57:06