The Business Case for Collective Landscape Action (Business Case) initiative, supported by USAID, in partnership with Rainforest Alliance, CDP, Clarmondial and Conservation International, was presented by their representatives during the GLF Climate conference, alongside COP27 on Friday, 11 November.
Sorely Calixto, Chief of Party of the Business Case in The Rainforest Alliance, explained “the goal of this five-year initiative is to scale-up reductions in commodity-driven deforestation while accelerating biodiversity conservation, restoration and community livelihoods gains by driving investment and innovation to local landscapes, while demonstrating its applicability globally.”
Calixto also described key impacts and results of the Business Case by 2026:
- 12.1 MT of CO2e reduced (forecasted reductions through 2030)
- 1.8 Million hectares under improved natural resource management (NRM)
- More than 12,000 people with economic co-benefits, which will lead to improving livelihoods
These impacts will be enabled by:
- More than 300 companies and investors with enhanced engagement in landscape sourcing, investing and strategy execution
- 70 institutions with enhanced capacity
- 13 innovative policy frameworks, standards, and tools to enable stakeholders to act on newly provided landscape and jurisdictional information. Among these tools, LandScale performance monitoring framework provides a foundation for measuring outcomes across the selected landscapes.
Priority landscapes
Implementation will take place in Sucumbios and Orellana provinces in Ecuador; Lamas, in San Martin region in Peru; Caqueta province in Colombia; and Sintang, West Kalimantan province in Indonesia. Regional engagement of the private sector will be developed in the states of Pará, Maranhao, Acre, Amapá and Mato Grosso (jurisdiction level) in Brazil.
In these landscapes, deforestation is mainly driven by global commodities such as beef/dairy, timber, palm oil, rubber, coffee, and cocoa (all together a leading cause for deforestation according to Global Forest Review). The implementation feasibility is high because consortium partners have a successful track record and boots-on-the-ground experience.
Luis Suárez, Vice-president of Conservation International in Ecuador, indicated “one of the strategic approaches is collaboration between partners for nature conservation, good governance, and sustainable production. Not only the approach of a sustainable landscape, but also its proper implementation. It also includes cross-cutting components, such as communication and environmental education, sustainable funding, research, and monitoring.”
Evolving sustainable landscape management
Across the Amazon and Indonesia, the rates of forest and biodiversity loss are increasing, while the global impacts of climate change are escalating. Solutions must address the underlying causes, which are common across many tropical landscapes facing commodity-driven deforestation: Poor government land-use planning and limited enforcement; limited finance or technical assistance for producers, communities, and Indigenous peoples; informal land-tenure and lack of traceability or monitoring to channel economic incentives for sustainable production; and large-scale restoration efforts are further hampered by high costs, lack of access to finance or ability to generate returns on multiple time horizons, and lack of materials or support for planting.
The Business Case will introduce a set of innovative solutions to address these causes, such as:
- A public-private partnership that connects experts in diverse sectors who can uniquely contribute to this critical development challenge.
- A design that takes research to action in globally important landscapes, while making it possible for governments, companies, and investors to align their policies and business practices in favor of landscape-scale impacts.
- A suite of replicable and scalable data, market, and financing solutions
According to Tanja Havemann, co-founder of Clarmondial, who presented how the initiative will drive investment, “often in landscapes many actors are involved but there is no specific responsible or someone that is willing to take full risk. We are proposing and Biosphere Investment Fund of private capital at scale to counter parts locally with synergies towards creating action plans.”
Thomas Maddox, Global Director of Forests and Land at CDP, explained about the disclosure request process. This includes key questions that financial investors, purchasers, or regulators make to companies, cities, states, and regions about environment topics. Answers are then scored according to their performance, transparency and publicly shared. This information provides decision-making towards investment. “This year, 191 companies are taking actions towards landscape actions through our platform, an increase of 305% engagement”, he concluded.
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For more information, please contact:
- Global media contact: Caroline Bennett, the Rainforest Alliance [email protected]
- Peru contact: Paola Chalcatana, Business Case Communication Manager [email protected]
