Business for Sustainable Landscapes

Public, private and civic groups are partnering for sustainable landscapes.

Public-private-civic partnerships for integrated landscape management (ILM) are emerging to address natural resource degradation, competition, and conflict–major impediments to economic growth, social well-being, and environmental stability around the world. Where resource challenges are inter-dependent across sectors, stakeholders are finding they cannot be addressed effectively through conventional tools of government regulation, business supply chain sustainability initiatives or community management. In response, landscape partnerships are becoming a key strategy to achieve food and water security and other Sustainable Development Goals at sub-national scales, and to meet commitments like the Bonn Challenge, the Aichi biodiversity targets, the Paris Climate Agreement, land degradation neutrality, the Consumer Goods Forum sustainable sourcing goals, and the New York Declaration on Forests.

More, better partnerships are needed

To achieve these critical sustainability goals globally will require a sharp increase in the total number of these partnerships, and in the rate and quality of business participation. In most productive landscapes, small and large businesses have a major impact on natural resource use and management, so landscape-wide goals are difficult to achieve without their action. Yet, out of 428 multi-stakeholder landscape partnerships documented around the world in studies conducted between 2013 to 2015, only a quarter involved private companies.

Drawing from diverse experience to frame next steps

This report draws widely from the diverse experience of landscape partnerships to analyze the challenges and opportunities for businesses and their partners. And it lays out critical actions needed by businesses themselves, and by financial institutions, governments and landscape programs, to improve the effectiveness of landscape partnerships and replicate the approach in many more places.