A systemic approach to evaluate shea parklands as possible climate smart agriculture to be intensified in Sudanese Africa : the multidisciplinary RAMSES Project

International audienceWe have set up a project on the « Roles of shea parklands in Reduction of vulnerability of AgrosysteMs and SociEties in Sub-Saharian Africa » (RAMSES) that has been submitted to several potential funders. This project ambitions to evaluate possible regeneration, extension and ecological intensification of shea production in Sudanese Africa, which is the only area supplying the international market with shea nuts (chocolate industriy) and butter (cosmestic industry). By this agroforestry practices, sub-Saharan societies seem to respond spontaneously to the MEA, diversifying their production while minimizing environmental degradation and deforestation impacts linked to extension of the cultivated areas. However, ecosystem services provided by shea trees are neither known nor quantified. Interactions between shea parklands and their associated socioeconomic systems is also currently in tension between the increasing demand at the international level and local degradations of shea stands with increasingly limited regeneration. This results in a worrying decrease in shea production capacity while enhancing competition between farmers, between genders (shea producers are women, trees and plots belong to men), or between private buyers on which the project propose a diagnosis. The project is based on multi-disciplinary investigations in two countries that are representative of the diversity of biophysical and socio-economic situations of the shea parklands, Benin and Burkina Faso. It ambitions to provide 1) a classification, with a geographic mapping support, of ecological combined to socio-economic conditions in which parklands are still viable from a past half- century diachronic and spatial analysis of their trajectory drivers; 2) under conditions where viability is proven, an assessment of increasing trees density impacts (i) on ecosystem services (ii) on the farms income, by using quantification of the processes underlying services provided by trees, and a bio-economic model to simulate different trees density