When considering uncertainty, agroforestry can reduce trade-offs between economic and ecological benefits

Persistent uncertainty about the economic implications of agroforestry presents a significant barrier to adoption. Despite this, most research to date ignores the impact of uncertainty on land allocation decisions, with studies commonly relying on simplistic scenarios involving a dichotomous choice between switching entirely to agroforestry or retaining the status quo system. For a more realistic decision problem, we explored partial adoption choices by analysing how the performance of landscape portfolios under combined ecological and economic uncertainty changes when managers can incorporate two agroforestry alternatives (silvopasture and alley cropping) alongside existing land-use options. Drawing on published data from smallholders in Panama, we used robust optimisation of multiple objectives to allocate fractions of land area across six agroforestry and non-agroforestry land uses under a range of possible futures. We visualised trade-offs between uncertain ecological and economic benefits using robust Pareto frontiers. We found that neglecting uncertainty reduces the attractiveness of agroforestry. Instead, agroforestry became increasingly competitive as uncertainty grew, and incorporating it into landscape portfolios could mitigate trade-offs between ecological and economic objectives when the future is uncertain. At the same time, we argue that agroforestry-uncertainty relationships are multi-layered. Early-life information is largely missing, and discontinuous cash flows, deficiencies in modelling, and a lack of financial incentives contribute to the uncertainty of agroforestry land uses and their barriers to broader adoption under global change.