Unlocking Investment in Sustainable Landscapes for Inclusive Green Growth
EcoAgriculture Partners’ President Sara Scherr announced Business for Sustainable Landscapes: An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development at the Forest and Landscape Investment Forum in Kigali, Rwanda. The report emphasizes that business participation and investment in landscape partnerships is essential for achieving inclusive green growth and sustainable development.
Businesses Are Acclimating to a New Habitat
Businesses are increasingly recognizing that engagement in landscape partnerships can help address challenges that extend beyond immediate supply chains. However, only about a quarter of the 428 large multi-stakeholder landscape partnerships surveyed currently include business actors.
Business for Sustainable Landscapes highlights the benefits companies can gain from investing in landscapes, including reduced environmental and social risks and improved protection of natural assets and ecosystem services such as forests, rivers, and freshwater systems.
As Peter Erik Ywema, Director Strategy and Engagement at SAI Platform, explains:
“Although landscapes are still not a natural business environment for most companies, the frontrunners are now starting to grasp the potential, take responsibility beyond their direct interests and seek collaborative solutions to address issues like water scarcity, deforestation or ecosystem services by landscape projects.”
Financial Instruments to Enable Landscape Partnerships Are Emerging
The report notes that innovative financial instruments designed to support landscape investments are rapidly emerging. These tools can help accelerate business engagement in landscape partnerships and include blended finance schemes, impact investment funds, investment standards and screening tools, and sustainable supply chain investment strategies.
According to Maginnis, these innovations have strong potential to support nature-based solutions such as forest landscape restoration and climate-smart supply chains. He highlights initiatives such as the IUCN Regional Forest Landscape Restoration Hub for Eastern and Southern Africa as examples of improved coordination at landscape level that can mobilize resources and technical capacity for community benefit.
Concrete Steps to Strengthen Partnerships for Development
The report was developed by EcoAgriculture Partners, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), SAI Platform, and Sustainable Food Lab under the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative. It outlines an action agenda with practical steps for businesses, financial institutions, governments, and landscape leaders to strengthen collaboration and drive socio-economic transformation through sustainable production and inclusive economic growth.
As Sara Scherr notes:
“Collaborative landscape approaches align stakeholders in a particular place to resolve complex issues that cannot be successfully resolved by actors working alone. These partnerships reflect growing recognition that long-term business success is tied to healthy communities and ecosystems.”
Stakeholders, including business leaders, investors, government officials, and civil society representatives, gathered at the Forest and Landscape Investment Forum in Kigali (16-17 May) to discuss these findings and explore opportunities for advancing sustainable landscape investment.