If the scientists themselves cannot work out what a landscape is, what hope do businesses have? Well, quite a lot, actually. In fact, there are many examples of big business engaging with local actors on a landscape scale, to protect their businesses long term, as well as protect the environment and the people in that landscape.
Originally posted on ICRAF’s Agroforestry Blog
There is a disconnect between commodities and landscapes in the sense that landscapes provide no direct benefits to business while providing many of the long-term services that will sustain their productivity. To investigate this link more rigorously, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) recently hosted an event that focussed on ways in which private companies worked at the landscape scales.
Entitled ‘Connecting commodities to landscapes through public-private-civic partnership,’ the event took place in the first week of the meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 40) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bonn on 6 June.
So what is a landscape?
Henry Neufeldt, Head of the Climate Change Unit of ICRAF, set the stage by looking at ways to define a landscape. In fact, there are many definitions, ranging from biophysical to sociological. One common thread is that a landscape is a mosaic of environments, communities and activities, sometimes with clear boundaries, sometimes without.
How we manage landscapes depends on what we want to get out of them. The challenge is to understand the patterns and processes going on within them. “We need to look at them as social-ecological systems,” said Neufeldt. A sectoral approach will have one or a few primary goals that themselves drive the approach. However, an integrated approach framed around the multifunctionality of the landscape will be driven by much wider interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral and participatory processes.
Why do businesses pursue landscape approaches?
Many companies have understood that it is in their long-term interest to invest in landscapes as the basis of their corporate success, and they are doing it more and more. For example, businesses operate to connect the cultivation of agricultural products to markets. Farmers produce goods in a certain space. Producing these goods requires inputs, such as fertilizers and labour, which often leads to environmental and other impacts. While the business can sell the products on the open markets, the impacts (such as leaching of nutrients into aquifers or greenhouse gas emissions) are often borne by the landscape itself.
There are an increasing number of initiatives that attempt to regulate these effects to avoid reducing the long-term productivity of the natural resource base. Gabrielle Kissinger, the principal of Lexeme Consulting in Canada, looked at the motivations for agribusinesses to manage beyond the farm and avoid or offset environmental damage. They are finding a lot of value in sustainable sourcing of their products as they come to understand future risks. For example, UNEP is predicting that freshwater demand will exceed supply by 40 percent by this year, which is a major threat to the business of SAB Miller, the second largest brewery company in the world.
Kissinger has been using SAB Miller as a case study, among many others. For them a failure in their water supply would be disastrous, so this is an operational and reputational risk. They are paying more for the water they use, and working with civil society and government groups to assure future supply. The company collaborated with the many groups concerned in the different landscapes spread across the word, where the company has factories.
One specific example was working with local farmers upstream to modify the way they worked to reduce the amount of run off from their land that was affecting water purity downstream. They have also protected natural habitats, improved rural livelihoods, paid for environmental services and reduced water consumption in their plants. “This has brought up a whole host of other issues that would not have become obvious if they had not looked at the landscape scale,” said Kissinger.
Starbucks is one of the largest coffee purchasers in the world, and it is very concerned about developing sustainable and fair bean supplies. In Mexico, Indonesia and Brazil, Kissinger found price volatility, with supplies declining due to the effects of climate change, reputational risks from deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, high water use and low quality, and community risks from associated farmer income and livelihoods. Taking a landscape approach, Starbucks modeled current and future areas of production in relation to climate and identified marginal areas that would lose production capability. “They even found a 30% decrease in safe production areas,” noted Kissinger.
In response, Starbucks is working to increase its understanding and anticipation of critical issues now and in the future. The company sees an advantage to their business and to the environment to invest in long-term efforts to challenges and engage all the players in the coffee landscape. This sort of approach requires an extended commitment to the sourcing area to justify the investment. “This is something that the technical staff quickly understand, but which is proving much more difficult to push through at the Board level,” said Kissinger. “However, after 10 years of engagement, you can really see changes.”
Another initiative that was recently started that looks for impact beyond the farm is the Sustainable Land and Water Programme, run by the IDH Sustainable Trade Initiative with support of the Dutch government. The program aims to bring together the interests, knowledge and power of public and private stakeholders in selected “resource vulnerable” regions. It will develop a business case to jointly work, and invest in sustainable land and water management, in order to safeguard natural resources for current and future users. “We believe that adding business drivers to sustainable land and water management creates a compelling case for effective public-private cooperation to mitigate the risks of resource depletion and poverty,” said Miriam van Gool, Interim Director of the Programme,“All landscape and commodity combinations are vulnerable to climate change, some more than others. Examples are Kenya and tea, Ethiopia and flowers, Ivory Coast and Ghana and cocoa,” she noted, “The private sector plays a key role in these landscapes.” Indeed, the programme will depend on co-funding, including from the private sector. Many companies now understand the need for long-term land and water management. The program aims to develop viable financial and governance models to sustain such integrated landscape management
Any examination of a landscape immediately shows the number of stakeholders. The program will support multistakeholder processes, and aims to visualize the costs and benefits for different stakeholders of different scenario
The South West Mau forest landscape in Kenya is one of the programme’s ‘fast-track landscapes’. SW Mau and the Central Highlands in Vietnam were chosen at the time of program approval last year. The program team is currently scoping other landscapes (from a longlist of over 50) and will add four more landscapes to the program later this year.
The Mau Forests are among the most important ecosystems in Kenya. Its forests provide critical ecological services to the country in terms of water storage, river flow regulation, flood mitigation, recharge of groundwater, reduced soil erosion, water purification, conservation of biodiversity and micro‐climate regulation.
The economic interests that surround the Mau region are key pillars for Kenya’s economy and thousands of small farmers, and local and international companies. The Mau area produces a number of agricultural commodities, such as tea and rice, timber, firewood, medicinal plants and fodder. The market value of goods and services derived is estimated at US$ 150 million per year. However, more than 130 000 ha of the original forest has already been cleared. The program aims to bring together local, national and international stakeholders, public and private, to develop a viable, long-term business plan for the area. “We are looking for an integrated perspective, tailored to the local landscape and local needs,” said van Gool. “We want joint investment and landscape management plans that sustain or improve food and fibre production, rural livelihoods and ecosystem services.”
And where do smallholders come in?
An expert panel at the event agreed that it was essential to include smallholders in planning landscape development. “It is important to consider how smallholder farmers manage the landscape they work in, and how this smallholder input can be valued by the rest of the supply-chain,” said Alexandre Meybeck of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Michael Bucki, Policy Officer of DG Climate, European Commission said, “The landscape approach depends on environmental, social and economic diversity, involving many stakeholders, ecosystems and administrative scales. It may therefore seem incompatible a priori with the inherent simplicity of rules/standards/metrics of international initiatives such as REDD+ or forest-friendly supply chains.”
Kate Horner from the Environmental Investigation Agency, which monitors threats to forests and their communities, said, “Many countries do not have adequate legal frameworks to address emerging threats, which makes it easier for companies to exploit landscapes. Public-private-civic partnerships could address this, taking into account smallholder farmers and civil society.
The take-home message
Landscapes are still poorly understood, but it is obvious that they are very complex, with many different stakeholders operating on different scales. If big business wants to secure a long-term future for its products, there is no alternative to cooperating with all the groups involved so that everyone gets something out of it yet the landscape itself is protected.
Read our policy brief relating to the event “Climate finance for agriculture and livelihoods“
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