Austrian Farmers have taken care of both - Farmland and Forests - since centuries because of the close interconnection of agriculture and forestry. Holistic land use management is obligatory for every Austrian farmer. Therefore it's not quite new for Austrian Farmers what the World Agroforestry Centre is concluding:

Farmers around the globe are keen on planting and protecting trees on their farmland, new study shows. Important to give famers further incentives to plant trees, says World Agroforestry Center.

Farmers should be seen as positive allies in the fight against climate change. They are actually part of the solution – all though they are often portrayed as a problem, cutting or burning forest to obtain farmland.

This is the message from the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi that just released a new report showing that farmers are widely protecting and planting trees. The report is the first to estimate tree cover on the world’s farmed land based on information from satellite photos. It tells that trees cover around ten percent of farmland.

"The area revealed in this study is twice the size of the Amazon, and shows that farmers are protecting and planting trees spontaneously," says Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, according to Reuters.

Farmers integrate trees in their farming in most parts of the world to create shade for crops, plant windbreaks and produce nuts, fruits, building materials etc. North Africa and West Asia are two exceptions to this climate friendly use of trees in farming.

According to the World Agroforestry Center, farmers would do more to preserve trees, if they got a stronger incentive and obtained credits under the new UN climate pact that will be negotiated at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December.