Asset Investments
Asset investments are a type of investment that creates tangible returns for the investor in the form of financial, environmental, or social values. In the landscape context, such investments include agricultural and other production/value-chain activities, industry and processing, green and built infrastructure, and natural resource restoration.
Business Accelerators
Business accelerators are organizations that offer support services and funding opportunities for startups. They often work by enrolling startups in months-long programs that provide mentorship, office space, and supply-chain resources. More importantly, business accelerator programs offer access to capital and investment in return for startup equity.
Business Incubation
Business incubation is when an individual or an organization supports a startup's establishment and growth. The goal of incubation is to increase a business's likelihood of succeeding.
Business Modeling
Business modeling is the primary financial analysis tool for nearly all major business decisions.
Capacity
Capacity is the ability or power to do, experience, or understand something.
Community of Practice
A community of practice is a group of people who share common concerns, problems, or interests in a topic and come together to fulfill individual and group goals. Communities of practice often focus on sharing best practices and creating new knowledge to advance a domain of professional practice. Interaction on an ongoing basis is an integral part of this. Many communities of practice rely on face-to-face meetings and web-based collaborative environments to communicate, connect and conduct community activities.
Ecoagriculture
Ecoagriculture is an approach to managing landscapes with three specific goals: conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services, provide agricultural products, and support viable livelihoods for local people.
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a complex network or interconnected system. The term often refers to a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.
Ecosystem services
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment. Ecosystem services are integral to providing clean air and water, waste decomposition, and resilient and productive food systems.
Financial Governance
Financial governance refers to procedures that ensure financial flows align with government regulations and goals in a given place. Essential elements of financial governance in the landscape context include transparency of finance and investment sources, accountability of those sources' social and environmental impacts, and compliance with regulations.
Financial Mechanism
A financial mechanism provides a method by which funds flow from the source to the recipient. Examples of financial mechanisms are bank loans, equity investments, and grants. The details of these mechanisms have implications for the types of activities that are stimulated in landscapes, how various entities can or cannot access financing, and how much they may ultimately benefit from, or be harmed by, finance from a specific source.
Inclusive Green Growth
Inclusive green growth is a framework for fostering economic growth and development while also ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies.
Integrated Landscape Finance (ILF)
Integrated landscape finance is an emerging finance approach that supports multiproject, multisector investment portfolios, which encourage synergies between investments to generate impacts at scale across several landscape objectives. The concept of integrated landscape finance draws from related, rapidly developing fields, including impact investing, conservation finance, collaborative place-based impact investing, blended finance, and inclusive green growth.
Integrated Landscape Management (ILM)
Integrated landscape management refers to long-term collaboration among different groups of land managers and stakeholders to achieve multiple objectives required from the landscape.
Specifically, there are five critical elements of integrated landscape management:
- Shared objectives that encompass multiple benefits from the landscape.
- Field, farm, and forest practices must be designed to benefit multiple objectives, including human well-being, food and fiber production, climate change mitigation, and conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
- Ecological, social, and economic interactions among different parts of the landscape are managed to realize positive synergies among interests and actors or to mitigate negative trade-offs.
- Collaborative, community-engaged processes for dialogue, planning, negotiating, and monitoring decisions are in place.
- Markets and public policies are shaped to achieve diverse landscape objectives and institutional requirements.
Landscape
Landscapes are mosaics of natural and human-modified ecosystems. They provide multiple benefits, including food and fiber, rural livelihoods and well-being, energy, raw materials, medicines, ecosystem services, and biodiversity. More technically, a landscape is a socio-ecological system influenced by distinct ecological, historical, economic, and socio-cultural processes and activities.
Landscape Approach
A landscape approach is a conceptual framework that helps stakeholders in a landscape reconcile competing social, economic, and environmental objectives. Landscape approaches move away from unsustainable, siloed, project-based land management programs. Such an approach aims to realize local needs and action (i.e., the interests of different stakeholders within the landscape) while also considering goals and outcomes important to stakeholders outside the landscape, such as national governments and the international community. One or more stakeholders engaging in independent actions or multiple collaborating actors may take a landscape approach.
Landscape Governance
Landscape governance refers to the institutional arrangements and general process of steering human interactions in a defined geographical area. It focuses specifically on the decision-making processes that seek to create and enforce socially binding agreements regarding people’s interactions with one another and the landscape around them. The agreements, if achieved, may also define who has the right to participate in governance decision-making and who enforces the rules.
Landscape Leader
A landscape leader is someone who facilitates and manages the diverse needs of people, agriculture systems and ecosystems within a region. These leaders motivate stakeholders to collaborate, synthesize resources to work sustainably, and prioritize the well-being of their communities.
Landscape Partnership (LP)
A landscape partnership (LP), also referred to as a multistakeholder partnership, is a robust and long-lasting coalition of organizations from across sectors and communities that work toward resilient landscape regeneration with a shared landscape vision.
Moving towards more resilient landscapes requires cycles of negotiation and opportunities for landscape actors to communicate effectively. LPs convene stakeholders to agree on and pursue a common strategy to achieve resilient and sustainable landscapes. LPs create a space for stakeholders to share information, develop a common understanding of problems and opportunities, negotiate outcomes, create a shared vision for the landscape, and collaboratively decide and implement action plans to sustainably manage a landscape’s resources. LPs can help build trust between different stakeholders. They assist in addressing conflicts over resource access, democratize development by giving a stronger voice to minority groups, and facilitate collective learning. Strong facilitation through an LP can help actors focus on negotiating their core interests rather than defending specific solutions. This collective approach also aids stakeholders in finding ways to enhance synergies and reduce tradeoffs among resource users and uses.
Landscape Sourcing
Landscape sourcing is a methodology that economic actors in the landscape can employ to strengthen the sustainability of their efforts. Landscape sourcing is product sourcing that contributes positively to the goals of a sustainable landscape through credible product certification coupled with consideration of social and ecological implications of management at a landscape scale.
Multistakeholder Collaboration
Multistakeholder collaboration is a process of interactive learning, empowerment, and participatory governance that enables stakeholders with interconnected sustainability problems and ambitions, but often differing interests, to be collectively innovative and resilient when faced with the emerging risks, crises, and opportunities of a complex and changing environment.
Regenerative Agriculture
Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening farm soil health and vitality.
Regenerative Economy
Rather than extracting from the land and each other, a regenerative economy approach emphasizes producing, consuming, and redistributing resources in harmony with the planet. A regenerative economy requires relocalization and democratization of how we produce and consume goods and ensures all have full access to healthy food, renewable energy, clean air and water, good jobs, and healthy living environments while supporting collective and participatory governance.
Seascape
A seascape retains the same definition as a landscape but includes all coastal and marine activities within a specific area that includes a coastline.
Scaling Up
Scaling up is a complex process that involves bringing together the needed resources, capacities, and funding to implement an intervention across different contexts to achieve a similarly replicable set of results. Not all interventions are suitable for scaling up.
Sustainable Agriculture
Sustainable agriculture is farming in ways to meet society's present food and textile needs without compromising the ability of current or future generations to meet their needs. Agriculture has an enormous environmental footprint, playing a significant role in causing climate change (food systems are responsible for one-third of the anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions), water scarcity, water pollution, land degradation, deforestation, and other processes. Agriculture simultaneously causes environmental changes and is impacted by these changes. Sustainable agriculture consists of environment-friendly farming methods that allow crop and livestock production without damage to human or natural systems. It involves preventing adverse effects on soil, water, biodiversity, and surrounding or downstream resources—as well as on those working or living on the farm or in neighboring areas. Elements of sustainable agriculture can include permaculture, agroforestry, mixed farming, multiple cropping, and crop rotation.
Synergies
Synergies are the interactions or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.
Anything we missed?
Let us know if there are any ecoagriculture terms that would be helpful to add.