2022: A Year of Advancing Landscape Thinking and Action

EcoAgriculture Partners is already gearing up for a big 2023 push to champion landscape approaches in tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Yet, as 2022 draws to a close, we stop for a moment to take stock of our achievements this past year and celebrate them.

It was a busy time: With world-renowned collaborators, we explored and advanced the intellectual frontier where sustainable development, regenerative agriculture, biodiversity conservation, climate change response, policy and finance meet. We expanded our co-convened action initiative 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People (1000L). And we advocated for landscapes at three of the most significant international gatherings around these issues.

Along the way, people’s stories from the landscapes have rung loudly across rolling hills and great plains, reminding us that the land is home to all of us. We are happy to share with you some of the ways EcoAgriculture Partners works to help people and nature to thrive.

Implementing Solutions

In 2022, we played a central role in growing the 1000L partnership to 50 organizations, including 22 landscape partnerships in 17 countries. As part of this initiative, we published the foundational Practical Guide to Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) and the Integrated Landscape Management Tool Guide. These toolkits provide comprehensive resources to help landscape leaders build more effective partnerships. We were also busy developing new capacity-building, finance and community-organizing solutions that we look forward to launching in 2023 for use by landscape partnerships.

EcoAgriculture Partners led 1000L in communications and storytelling. Through these efforts, we support landscape work on the ground by amplifying partners’ success stories.  For example, we created 1000L’s first ‘Landscapes in Action’ multimedia story, spotlighting our longtime partner’s impressive work at Kijabe Environment Volunteers (KENVO) in Kenya.

Policy Advocacy

Our team was front and center at several global events addressing our planet’s most pressing challenges. EcoAg joined our 1000L partners in Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt and Canada to highlight how landscape approaches offer effective solutions during UN conventions to combat desertification, climate change and biodiversity loss. Ahead of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity COP 15, our team partnered with the Government of the Netherlands, the UN Development Programme’s BIOFIN initiative and the Wolfs Company to draft recommendations for how governments can incorporate integrated landscape management and finance into their biodiversity conservation planning.

EcoAg also showcased the future of regenerative agriculture and its role in supporting ecosystems and livelihoods with governments worldwide. We demonstrated the global relevance of Mexico’s innovations. For instance, in July, we participated in the launch event of the Declaration of Climate Action to Recover Mexico’s Natural Heritage. This unique proclamation will promote holistic methods like ILM across the country to address climate change, reduce emissions, minimize biodiversity loss and combat hunger and poverty.

In addition, we added to our arsenal of tools and resources for landscape leaders with the launch of the Landscape Climate-Smart Agriculture Course. This full curriculum of free training resources helps local governments and landscape leaders to mobilize climate-smart landscapes, scaling profitable local farming methods that provide healthy, sustainable food while decreasing climate impacts and supporting climate resilience.

Advancing ILM Knowledge

Throughout the year, EcoAgriculture Partners spearheaded research on public policy, financial mechanisms and their role in supporting landscape partnerships. Our experts worked with colleagues in leading institutions to investigate how government policies could better enable such initiatives by incorporating ILM principles. This work resulted in the white paper Public Policy Support for Landscape and Seascape Partnerships: Meeting Sustainable Development Goals Through Collaborative Territorial Action.

Another study co-authored by EcoAgriculture Partners revealed that current approaches to landscape-level finance offer limited, unsustainable solutions. In the paper, Access to Landscape Finance for Small-Scale Producers and Local Communities: A Literature Review, the authors identify multiple approaches that can direct landscape-level funding to smallholders and small and medium enterprises that need them most.

We joined the Agroecology Coalition and actively participated in their interactive dialogue on the intersection between agroecology, landscape and territorial approaches. The discussion brought together leading researchers, policymakers and program managers to discuss how these methods can work in tandem to make food systems more just, resilient and sustainable. We also participated in a Latin American Model Forest Network meeting held in Risaralda, Colombia, sharing EcoAg’s experience in integrated landscape management and proposing ways for their network of landscape partnerships can collaborate with 1000L.