Message from CEO
2019 brought an explosion of action globally to use Integrated Landscape Management (ILM), as a means to implement the Sustainable Development Goals, building on local values and priorities. EcoAgriculture Partners made important contributions this year: launching an unprecedented collaboration to scale ILM; developing new models and tools for landscape finance; convening landscape leaders across Africa; guiding climate-smart landscapes; deepening analysis of ILM in relation to property rights, land restoration, and agroforestry; and we joined several new global partnerships. See the some of the highlights below. We hope you are encouraged and inspired as we celebrate the new year, and will join us.
Best wishes,
Sara Scherr
President and CEO of EcoAgriculture Partners
On behalf of the EcoAgriculture team
To really decorate our Landscapes we need world-wide collaboration | Drawing: Jose Navarro for EcoAgriculture Partners (@elmicronauta)
1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People: Getting Started
After several years of incubation, we kicked off the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People Initiative – an unprecedented global collaboration to institutionalize the support local landscape partnerships need to thrive in the long term. In November, we held our inception workshop in Amsterdam with the founding partners: EcoAgriculture Partners (convener), Rainforest Alliance, TechMatters, Commonland, the WWF Landscape Finance Lab, and UN Development Programme (See the concept note for the Initiative). Another 20 partner organizations from around the world have already committed to collaborating in the 2020-2021 Design Phase of the initiative, and others will soon be joining the effort.
Reflecting our user-centered design approach, one Design Team has begun interviewing landscape partnerships to learn their priorities and design preferences for a digital landscape action platform. Design Teams on landscape finance and institutionalizing capacities for ILM are getting organized and will be consulting deeply with funders, landscape developers, and policymakers as well.
Convening Landscape Leaders: the 3rd African Landscapes Dialogue
For a week in November, nearly 150 participants from 18 African countries (and several non-African participants) came together in Arusha, Tanzania for the African Landscapes Dialogue: a gathering of Landscape Leaders from across Africa bound together by a shared vision and responsibility to problem solve collective problems facing the continent and the planet. The Dialogue focused on creating innovative partnerships while highlighting the central role of the ‘local champions‘, the local landscape leaders. They explored African innovations in ILM related to stakeholder convening, land use planning, biodiversity conservation, climate-smart landscapes, landscape finance, entrepreneurship, and gender and youth.
The event was hosted by the National Land Use Planning Commission of Tanzania and co-organized by EcoAgriculture Partners with more than a dozen African regional organizations (see more here).
New Models for Integrated Landscape Finance
During 2019, EcoAg worked intensively with partners to advance innovative models of coordinated, multi-sector finance to meet the full needs of ILM investment.
North America Landscape Finance Forum
In October, we convened the North America Landscape Finance Forum in Chicago, to explore integrated landscape investment models being developed in the U.S. and Canada. The Forum developed a better understanding of the key elements of integrated landscape investments, shared knowledge among innovators, and identified collaborative actions to further build and scale up these models. The Forum was organized together with FAO, Solutions from the Land, the Atkinson Center of Cornell University, Living Economy, and the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (CPIC).
Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation – Landscapes and Seascapes
Since launching in September 2016, the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (CPIC), a global multi-stakeholder initiative, has focused on enabling private, return-seeking investment in conservation projects. In 2019 EcoAgriculture Partners teamed up with this powerhouse to work out how to amplify their sectoral work on conservation finance, through landscape approaches. The new Landscape and Seascape Finance Working Group, under leadership of EcoAgriculture Partners and IUCN-Netherlands, did a global scoping of landscape finance models, to be published in early 2020.
Global Outreach on Financing Landscape Investment Portfolios
Sara Scherr, EcoAgriculture Partners’ President and CEO, organized and moderated the Landscape Finance plenary, at the Global Landscapes Forum in Bonn. With a world-class group of speakers, she introduced the concept of Landscape Investment Portfolios – the full set of projects/businesses and their associated capital requirements needed to achieve landscape-scale regeneration.
Landscape investment tools
The Landscape Investment and Finance Toolkit (LIFT) website was completely overhauled in May. Check it out!
EcoAgriculture Partners also collaborated with Tropenbos International to develop the Landscape Assessment of Financial Flows (LAFF) methodology. A practical two-phase approach helps stakeholders identify local sources of finance for new investment ideas, find the current financial flows that are most in need of transformation, and better understand the elements of a landscape’s financial context. In 2019, the tool was piloted in Indonesia and Ghana, and plans are underway to implement further pilots in 2020.
Guiding Climate-Smart Landscapes
As efforts intensify to address climate change causes and effects at scale, ILM is being recognized as a nature-based solution that also meets critical challenges for food security, biodiversity conservation, and water security. In 2019, EcoAgriculture Partners provided practical guidance.
Advising the Global Commission on Adaptation
World leaders from the Global Commission on Adaptation are calling on governments, businesses and community leaders to take urgent action to advance climate adaptation solutions. EcoAgriculture Partners produced a Background Report for the Commission, outlining how ILM can contribute to climate change adaptation. Our report’s recommendations were included in the GCA’s new Global Call to #AdaptOurWorld.
Training Guides
EcoAgriculture Partners, together with Cornell University and UC Davis, produced a 6-module curriculum on Climate Smart Agricultural (CSA) Landscapes for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and USAID, to support local governments and other landscape partners to plan and implement Landscape CSA. The curriculum was tested in several training courses in Tanzania, in collaboration with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and is now being refined for use across the African continent.
Meanwhile, EcoAgriculture Partners developed a guide to our current training course offerings and services ´Strengthening Capacities for Integrated Landscape Management´, to aid organizations, landscape partnerships and individuals select courses and tailor them to suit their unique needs at different stages of development of landscape projects, programs or policies.
Deepening Analysis of Integrated Landscape Management
We continued analytical work to further deepen our understanding of ILM, including:
- A global review report on Tenure and Property Rights and Integrated Landscape Management, with Cornell Univesity, for the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature initiative, with support from Oxfam International.
- The synthesis chapter for an International Resource Panel (IRP) Report on using Land Restoration through ILM to achieve the SDGs,
- Co-Organization, with Cornell University and the University of Goettingen-Germany, of the Theme on ‘Agroforestry Landscapes‘ for the 4th World Congress on Agroforestry in Montpellier, France, and the presentation of the Keynote address on Scaling Agroforestry through Integrated Landscape Management.
Other Global Partnerships
This year, EcoAgriculture Partners became a partner of LandScale.This is an emerging tool to help drive landscape-scale sustainability, by providing measurable indicators of the state and trajectory of sustainability at the landscape level across environmental, social, and economic dimensions.
Furthermore, EcoAgriculture Partners became a strategic Partner to the Rockefeller Foundation Food System Vision Prize. This Prize is an invitation for organizations across the globe, including integrated landscape initiatives, to develop a Vision of the regenerative and nourishing food system that they aspire to create by the year 2050.