Pressures on landscapes and people driven by soaring global consumption call for innovative solutions to enable sustainability. Many consumption-related harms are especially acute in countries of the global South where commodities are produced. Given their role as main suppliers of global consumption, businesses – especially multinational companies – have major potential to enable more sustainable use of landscapes, in collaboration with the public sector. This policy brief highlights the promise and challenges of sustainability-oriented landscape approaches involving the private sector, as well as how existing landscape initiatives might be improved.

Key messages
Landscape approaches hold promise as an innovative solution to safeguard ecosystems while balancing the claims and needs of different stakeholders, including local people in commodity-producing countries and global consumers linked via export markets.

Private-sector actors, especially multinational companies, increasingly engage in landscape initiatives. But many of these initiatives have key design gaps that must be addressed.

Landscape initiatives should look beyond individual value chain activities and sourcing areas in a landscape. They should support diverse land uses and ecosystem services in a given landscape and foster effective collaboration among all relevant stakeholders.

The quality of landscape initiatives could be improved if businesses collaborated more with outside experts – including scientists and development specialists.

READ further from the source
Sonderegger G, Providoli I, Hett C, Bürgi Bonanomi E, Oberlack C, Zeleke G. 2024. Sustainable Landscapes: How Can the Private Sector Contribute? CDE Policy Brief, No. 21. Bern, Switzerland: CDE.