Journal of Experimental Agriculture International

Agroforestry is widely promoted as a land-use strategy that can retain agricultural production while increasing carbon storage in woody biomass and soils. Yet the magnitude, durability and climate significance of this sequestration vary markedly with the land-use baseline, system design, climate, soil, tree age, management and accounting method. This critical narrative review evaluates the evidence for carbon sequestration across silvoarable, silvopastoral, hedgerow, shelterbelt, homegarden, coffee- and cocoa-based agroforestry systems, with attention to both biomass and soil organic carbon. Recent meta-analyses generally support positive carbon gains when trees are introduced into cropland or other relatively low-carbon agricultural land, whereas conversion of natural forest to agroforestry can reduce ecosystem carbon and should not be framed as mitigation. The most robust evidence concerns increased woody biomass and topsoil organic carbon; confidence is lower for deep-soil responses, long-term saturation, below-ground biomass and whole-system greenhouse-gas balances. Reported sequestration rates are difficult to compare because many studies use chronosequences, shallow sampling, fixed-depth soil inventories, generic allometric equations or incomplete baselines. Methane and nitrous oxide fluxes are also rarely measured concurrently with carbon stocks. Carbon benefits therefore depend not only on additional storage but on permanence, avoided displacement, product fate and maintenance of food or forage production. Stronger measurement, reporting and verification requires permanent plots, appropriate counterfactuals, equivalent-soil-mass approaches, spatially representative sampling around tree rows, repeated measurement, uncertainty propagation and full greenhouse-gas accounting. Agroforestry can make a credible contribution to climate mitigation when established on suitable agricultural land and designed for durable biomass and soil carbon gains, but it is not a substitute for protecting high-carbon natural ecosystems.