11 areas for collaborative action in integrated landscape finance 

The world must rapidly shift toward inclusive, sustainable, and resilient economies that balance the needs of people and the planet. This requires transformations at the individual farm, enterprise, supply chain, and urban centre levels and holistically at the “landscape” scale to address critical ecological, economic, and social processes.  

EIT Climate-KIC’s Director of Sustainable Land Use Daniel Zimmer, contributed to a report from the 1000 Landscapes For 1 Billion People - a project led by EcoAgriculture Partners – that aims to address the current barriers to effective implementation and scaling of integrated landscape finance by offering 11 areas for collaborative paths forward. 

“We refer to a ‘landscape’ as a territory in which there are human beings, nature, and economic activities that interact. Today, we must consider how to ensure that these different elements can coexist in the best possible way and how to use the territory to its fullest potential. I believe that regenerative approaches and landscape approaches must go hand in hand,” says Zimmer. 

The need and opportunities for integrated landscape finance 

The report focuses on “integrated landscape finance” a developing approach and set of tools that generate finance from diverse sources to achieve local objectives for landscape transformation. This approach assumes that ecological, social, and economic interactions among different projects and enterprises in a landscape can have powerful negative or positive interactions on profitability, risk, and impacts. It offers a model for financing multi-project, multi-sector investment portfolios that encourages synergies and reduces risk across investments and their objectives. As such, it addresses the limitations of conventional project-based, sector-focused, short-term finance and has the potential to generate holistic transformation.  

In practice today, landscape partnerships of key stakeholders develop the vision for transformation and help guide this coordinated investment agenda. However, despite its promise, systemic barriers slow the uptake of integrated landscape finance. Landscape partnerships cannot often build pipelines of projects, assess current and potential finance flows, and develop strategies and fit-for-purpose mechanisms to mobilise them. Short-term, uncoordinated commercial, philanthropic, public, and civic sector projects are poorly aligned at best, and at worst, undermine integrated strategies for landscape transformation. Financiers lack the experience, capacity, and mandate to invest across sectors and at necessary scales to make a systemic impact. 

Zimmer explains: “Often, external actors intervening in landscapes are extractive actors, meaning they purchase products from the territory. Being extractive exposes them to not being sufficiently engaged with the territory’s sustainability, such as the need for circular economy approaches, and the need for regenerative approaches. But as soon as products are extracted from a given territory, it disrupts natural cycles, so it’s important to be able to combine these extractive activities with sustainability activities. The problem is that this is not often well understood.” 

This report identifies barriers to integrated landscape finance and proposes collaborative solutions. Over 80 financial leaders were interviewed, revealing deployment methods, expansion opportunities, and challenges. Partnering with IKEA and Laudes Foundations, the report’s team convened 175 stakeholders to uncover three dimensions of cross-sectoral collaboration required to enhance finance systems for integrated landscape initiatives. 

Sara Scherr, President and CEO of EcoAgriculture Partners and Chair of the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People project said: “What was interesting is that we managed to develop a series of priorities that seem quite coherent across three main action groups through all these discussions. The first group focuses on mobilising financial actors to understand why integrated landscape approaches are important, and what opportunities they present for the world of finance. The second action group centred on the need to share and deepen knowledge, to develop peer-to-peer approaches as well as the de-risking capacity of the portfolio of landscape activities. The third pillar focuses on how to make different financial mechanisms and types of funders work together because we can have public, institutional, and private funding. So, how can we attempt to coordinate their actions and investments more broadly.” 

See the detailed 11 specific areas for collaborative action: 

“Ultimately, we see that integrated territorial approaches are undergoing reflection on implementation, financing, and the coordination of various actions within these landscapes, which can serve many activities we are currently developing at EIT Climate-KIC, such as the Deep Demonstrations. People working on the 1000 Landscapes for 1 billion people are eagerly awaiting the insights that will be drawn from our work on the Deep Demonstrations.“

Following these discussions and the report, the 1000 Landscapes for 1 billion people team is currently fundraising to try to implement these ideas. If you’re interested in participating, please contact: Daniel.zimmer(@)climate-kic.org 

For more information about this project, visit 1000 Landscapes for 1 billion people. 

Read the full report