For the full interactive report, please visit CDP’s webpage here.
Governments, companies and civil society are increasingly using landscape and jurisdictional approaches (LA/JAs) to work collectively and to meet nature targets across multiple landscapes around the world.
Through collaborative efforts between all relevant stakeholders, LA/JAs have the potential to drive change at scale in a way that individual actions simply cannot. By disclosing through CDP, stakeholders can publicly communicate their landscape and jurisdictional actions, investments and outcomes relating to sustainable commodity production, conservation, and the restoration of natural ecosystems, biodiversity, resilience and human well-being.
What are landscape and jurisdictional approaches?
A landscape approach is a place-based management approach that involves stakeholders collaborating in a landscape to advance shared sustainability goals and build resilience. It aims to reconcile and optimize social, economic and environmental objectives across many economic sectors and land uses. Such approaches are implemented through land-use plans, policies, initiatives, long-term investments and other interventions.
Jurisdictional approaches differ in that they are aimed at advancing shared sustainability goals in landscapes defined by administrative boundaries of subnational governments. Also, this approach is implemented with a high level of government involvement compared to landscape approaches.
Timeline of LA/JA disclosure through CDP
Both the public and private sectors are recognizing the value of collaborative and multi-stakeholder approaches at scale. Additionally, a wider community of practitioners and initiatives are working to increase adoption of LA/JAs globally. These include the Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN), 1000 Landscapes, the Forest Positive Coalition (FPC) and the Governors’ Climate and Forest Task Force.
LA/JA disclosure from companies, states and regions
Despite the increase in companies disclosing engagement with LA/JAs in 2022, there remains a high number of companies disclosing engagements in initiatives that do not meet key criteria for LA/JAs. This suggests that there is a knowledge gap on what LA/JAs are, and how they compare to or complement other types of projects and value chain initiatives.
To support organizations’ understanding of LA/JAs, CDP has developed a maturity matrix to help organizations assess disclosure against four key criteria. This matrix is available in our discussion paper, ‘Assessing the Credibility of Disclosed Corporate Engagements in Landscape and Jurisdictional Approaches’.
The following information focuses on disclosure data that at least partially meet these key criteria.
Status of LA/JA engagement worldwide
This map shows LA/JAs publicly disclosed by corporates, states and regions in 2022. More than 100 unique initiatives are featured.
The red triangles represent initiatives disclosed by companies and the green triangles represent initiatives disclosed by states and regions.
For the full interactive map please visit CDP’s webpage here.
Initiatives are present on all continents (excluding Antarctica) but are heavily concentrated in Brazil and Indonesia. They support the sustainable production of seven major commodities. The commodities most frequently disclosed and sourced by companies on LA/JAs are timber products, followed by palm oil, cattle, soy and cocoa.
CDP is collaborating on a series of commodity-specific briefs that trends, lessons learned and recommendations from downstream and midstream company engagements in LA/JAs, with Tropical Forest Alliance and Proforest. These papers are available on the Jurisdictional Approaches Resource Hub:
Why should companies engage in LA/JAs?
Companies selected their reasons for prioritizing landscapes and jurisdictions for engagement, reflecting internal corporate objectives around environmental and social impact.
Among forest disclosers, the most common reasons for engaging in LA/JAs are to protect and restore natural ecosystems, to address risks of deforestation/conversion and smallholder inclusion.
LA/JA goals supported by companies
Companies also selected the collective goals of each initiative they supported. Grouping these goals by category reveals that engagement is most often intended to support commodity production, habitat conservation and deforestation/conversion goals.
Social goals in the human rights, land tenure, human wellbeing and governance categories were selected far less.
Effective LA/JAs can achieve a range of goals across all of these categories. For governments and corporates with commitments related to deforestation, smallholder wellbeing or climate mitigation, engaging with LA/JAs can help stakeholders successfully meet targets.
The need for public-private action at scale
Harmonized action between companies and governments is essential to ensure the long-term efficacy of a landscape initiative. Identifying high value actions can help organizations prioritize their engagement strategy and efforts.
Generally, the most common LA/JA actions taken by companies align with the actions that states and regions deem most helpful for companies to carry out.
75% of states and regions disclosed that they are not currently leading or involved with LA/JAs due to a lack of financial resources. Almost 60% of the states and regions engaging in LA/JAs disclosed that government subsidies are the current major source of funding for their initiatives. Therefore, the private sector has a key role to play in investing in new and existing initiatives.
Most initiatives disclosed by states and regions have developed implementation plans and are operational. 25% are related to their efforts on Jurisdictional REDD+ (Reduction of Emissions for Deforestation and forest Degradation, ‘+’ sustainable forest management, conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks). Other states can look to these as examples and roadmaps for their action plans. Companies can support the design, implementation and monitoring of these types of integrated initiatives with multiple nature goals.
In collaboration with ISEAL and a wider practitioner community on LA/JAs, a series of joint position papers have been developed with further guidance for companies on effective actions, investments and related claims.
Monitoring and reporting on landscape initiatives
Companies and governments must ensure they track the progress and performance of LA/JAs. Effective and transparent monitoring systems of LA/JAs are essential to ensure that initiatives are delivering their intended impacts, to help identify successes as well as inform future decisions. Of all disclosed initiatives in 2022 by companies and governments, 90% are using a specifically designed monitoring framework. 66% of companies report building monitoring frameworks and making the results publicly available, whereas only 28% of government initiatives use public monitoring frameworks to evaluate their LA/JAs.
In order to incentivize long-term and scalable investments, impactful monitoring frameworks are needed to help collect and share insights. Companies and sub-national governments should disclose through CDP to help track and promote their LA/JAs and communicate findings from monitoring frameworks.
Many tools are available to support initiatives with monitoring, reporting and data collection. Examples of robust landscape-level monitoring frameworks that companies, conveners and sub-national governments can use for LA/JAs include:
- LandScale, an assessment framework and platform for stakeholders to assess landscape performance over time against key indicators in ecosystems, human well-being, governance and production; and
- SourceUp, a platform that connects investors and purchasing companies with producing regions, and also facilitates the creation of agreements signed by local stakeholders to address sustainability challenges (‘SourceUp Compacts’).
Conclusion
As awareness of the importance of long-term nature protection grows, CDP continues to evolve its questionnaires to align with leading frameworks and incorporate topics such as LA/JAs and biodiversity.
Meeting nature goals means addressing the links between intergenerational justice, human well-being and ecological integrity. Integrated and collective action at landscape and jurisdictional scales can allow the realization of these goals and resilient communities and ecosystems in the long term.
In 2023, a number of changes to the CDP questionnaires were carried out to improve disclosure quality and relevance to real-world impact. For LA/JA disclosure, these changes included:
- updates to corporate reasons for (and not) engaging;
- options of involved stakeholders; and
- the inclusion of a question on production or consumption volumes from engaged landscapes.
You can read our guidance for companies, states and regions, and learn more about CDP’s other LA/JA related projects.