Dominique le Roux
The world must rapidly shift toward inclusive, sustainable, and resilient economies that balance the needs of people and the planet. This requires transformations not only at the individual farm, enterprise, supply chain, and urban center levels, but also holistically at the landscape scale to address critical ecological, economic, and social processes. Integrated landscape finance (ILF) offers a solution.
ILF is a developing approach and set of tools that generate finance from diverse sources to achieve local objectives for landscape transformation. The 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 multiproject, multisector investment portfolios that encourage synergies between investments and positively impact multiple objectives (e.g., biodiversity, climate, and food production). As such, it addresses the limitations of conventional project-based, sector-focused, short-term finance and generates holistic transformation. 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 often lack the capacity to build pipelines of projects, assess current and potential finance flows, and develop strategies and fit-for-purpose mechanisms to mobilize 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.
This report by the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People (1000L) programme aims to address current barriers to the effective implementation and scaled-up use of ILF by offering collaborative paths forward. It is based on 1000L’s Finance Solutions Team’s framework for mobilizing key actors to transform the finance system to support integrated landscape investments.
