The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) has created the Forest Positive Coalition of Action, led by 21 companies with a collective market value of US$2 trillion, to leverage collective action and accelerate systemic efforts to remove deforestation, forest degradation and conversion from key commodity supply chains, while supporting sustainable forest management, conservation and restoration. The Coalition believes that its collective reach will enable members to make progress on four goals:
(1) Accelerate efforts to remove commodity-driven deforestation from individual supply chains.
(2) Set higher expectations for traders to act across their entire supply base.
(3) Drive transformational change in key commodity landscapes.
(4) Define measurable outcomes on which all members agree to track and report individually and collectively

The Palm Oil Roadmap lays out the specific commitments, actions and KPIs that the group will implement to drive change, recognising equal responsibility but different activities for direct soy buyers and users of embedded soy. Element 4 of the Palm Oil Roadmap highlights the Coalition’s commitment to engage in palm oil production landscapes. Building on the progress made by other initiatives in the palm oil sector, the Coalition will focus on actions where members’ collaboration can add the most value towards a forest positive sector.

Understood as a more comprehensive approach to low-emissions development than jurisdictional-scale accounting for REDD+, the Jurisdictional Approach (JA) was seen as a way to address challenges faced by early efforts to implement corporate commitments to deforestation-free supply chains. JA initiatives sought to align government-led, multistakeholder processes within provinces and districts with prospective external incentives for jurisdictional-scale performance.

Over the past several years, the community of JA proponents and practitioners had grown rapidly and coalesced around a common understanding of what the approach entails. Credible, locally led JA initiatives were underway with international support in at least a dozen provinces and districts, and a national platform had been established to link districts that had committed to sustainability. Those initiatives were accompanied by active discourses on proposals for fiscal transfers and preferential market access to provide incentives for improved jurisdictional-scale performance based on indicators such as reduced deforestation.

While it is too early to assess the ability of JA to generate significant results, practitioners have identified a number of constraints. Those include still-limited material incentives for change compared to the factors that drive businessas-usual deforestation, limited availability of spatial data for better land-use planning, low capacity of district-level officials, and misalignment of government policies between subnational and national entities and across ministries. In order to adequately test the JA theory of change, greater emphasis on creating external incentives and linking JA initiatives across jurisdictions and scales is needed to complement the facilitation of activities within individual provinces and districts.

This district profile includes key data related to sustainability in Sintang district in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, and and a brief assessment of its progress towards jurisdictional sustainability. The profile has been developed collaboratively by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Sintang Government, Earth Innovation Institute, Sustainable Districts Association (Lingkar Temu Kabupaten Lestari, or LTKL) and the civil society organization coalition Forum Komunikasi Masyarakat Sintang.

Starting to be conceptualised in 2018, Sintang Lestari (Sustainable Sintang) Vision seeks to optimize socio-economic benefits while maintaining integrity of natural resources and the environment. Its key implementing regulation, Sintang Lestari Regional Action Plan (RAD-SL), aims to facilitate a systemic transition to sustainability; it is the basis for government agencies to implement work and strategic plans to achieve this vision. Designed with inputs from various stakeholders and facilitated by Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF) Indonesia, RAD-SL has seven “missions” aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with performance indicators, goals/targets, and a roadmap to 2030.

A multi-stakeholder forum (Joint Secretariat, or SekBer) involving representatives from the local government, CSOs and its Forum, indigenous peoples, and the private sectorhas been established as a transparent institutional governance system to encourage the implementation of RAD-SL, improve local government capacity, and bridge communication between stakeholders.

There is emerging consensus that companies cannot deliver the ‘no deforestation’ and ‘no conversion’ ambitions at the pace and scale required without collaboration and alignment with other actors. Government involvement – especially at the sub-national level through multi-stakeholder ‘jurisdictional approaches’ – is increasingly recognized as an important catalyst for the success of efforts led by the private sector and civil society. However, lack of consistent, reliable information for companies about these approaches and potential outcomes hampers their appetite for involvement. At the same time, lack of capacity at sub-national level to develop, implement and report on these interventions impede the scaling of jurisdictional approaches.

Through ‘Enabling Jurisdictional Approaches to Halt Deforestation’ funded by the Walmart Foundation, CDP will implement a program which will contribute towards addressing these challenges. Creating and implementing a standardized and consistent assessment as to the quality of the jurisdictional processes can incentivize key stakeholders, including companies and sub-national governments, to engage with these interventions. Further, the process of responding to this new assessment supports sub-national governments in understanding what information is needed by the market and builds their capacity and ability to provide that information.

The factsheet highlights the Produce, Conserve, Include (PCI) as an investment-ready model designed to meet aggressive targets in Mato Grosso in Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse state that produces nearly 30% of Brazil’s soy and has more than 30 million cattle, the largest herd in the country. The Mato Grosso government created the PCI strategy, a leading jurisdictional approach, for a new vision for the state’s future: increased productivity across the state while maintaining native vegetation cover and reducing deforestation.

The PCI’s ambitious vision add up to huge environmental benefits: over 6 gigatons of avoided emissions by 2030. Meeting these aggressive targets requires a multi-stakeholder effort, and the PCI brings together government agencies, civil society, producer groups and companies to drive toward impact.

This factsheet outlines the case for companies to engage in the PCI. Benefits include: (1) Progress toward corporate forest goals; (2) Incentives for sustainable expansion of production; (3) Robust and transparent statewide monitoring; (4) Reduced deforestation risk across the state; (5) Progress toward corporate climate goals; (6) Proof of concept for a new model of deforestation leadership

A jurisdictional approach can be a useful complement to sustainable sourcing by ensuring that there is sufficient volume and supply of sustainable commodities to make company deforestation-free commitments realizable, and by helping to avoid system leakage whereby sustainable sourcing approaches by some companies are undermined by other companies adopting non-sustainable approaches. This research identifies several emerging trends that could support a jurisdictional approach.

The publication highlights key reasons why jurisdictional approaches are crucial for tackling deforestation. First, they can help to mainstream sustainability in the forest regions versus creating “an oasis of green in a desert of deforestation” where sustainability efforts are undermined by leakage from continued deforestation elsewhere. Second, jurisdictional approaches have the greatest potential for long-term impact by seeking to reconcile competing social, economic, and environmental objectives through active engagement of local institutions. Finally, jurisdictional approaches provide the opportunity to create replicable examples of success to inspire change elsewhere.


Three potential unique roles for TFA partners identified in the study are:
(1) Signal publicly. TFA and its partners could relay to key stakeholders (involved in the jurisdictions) of the importance of the jurisdiction’s sustainable development plans and its associated goals and activities.
(2) Establish sustainable sourcing roadmaps and targets.
(3) Develop a cross-jurisdictional platform to shorten the “learning curve” for jurisdictions by providing a repository of both local and international best practices to engage with the private sector, local communities, smallholders, government agencies, and civil society

This paper, developed through a workshop of practitioners convened by WWF, provides case studies and a detailed comparative analysis of five-place based initiatives in Brazil, Liberia, Ghana, and Colombia, and lessons learned extracted from them.

Key learnings are:
(1) Political leadership is key to advancing a jurisdictional approach, but it is also a primary risk; initiatives need to be designed to be resilient to political change.
(2) A push for quick results and a desire to avoid opposition to a jurisdictional initiative sometimes interfere with early, inclusive engagement; however, success in the long term depends on stakeholder engagement in initiative design and implementation.
(3) Several types of financing are needed, likely in stages, to support and sustain jurisdictional approaches; proponents need to differentiate categories of finance and to be able to articulate and align specific needs (and deliverables) to financial offerings.
(4) Private sector actors are crucial for success, given the dominant role that market forces often play in driving land use change compared with public finance. That said, proponents must distinguish the needs and roles of different private sector actors to delineate asks, expectations, and compelling partnerships.
(5) Skilled and tailored storytelling that articulates a jurisdictional initiative’s goals, needs, and early successes is critical to building support and growth among different audiences.
(6) The complexity and duration of jurisdictional initiatives requi re sustained investment to achieve systemic change; therefore, local and global expectations should be thoughtfully managed to avoid creating unachievable goals or time frames, and to help ensure lasting results.

This report provides an overall synthesis of jurisdictional sustainability across the tropics based on research in 39 subnational jurisdictions where there are intentions in place towards implementing a low-emission development agenda. These jurisdictions, spread in 12 countries, encompass 28% of the world’s tropical forests and vary widely in both their deforestation rates and the amount of their forest that is remaining.

The study found that nearly all (38 of 39) jurisdictions have signed formal, international scale commitments to slow deforestation and/or accelerate reforestation or forest recovery. Many are financing and implementing innovative policies and programs, prioritizing indigenous peoples, local communities, and smallholder farmers as key beneficiaries of these interventions. Deforestation has declined in half (19 of 39) of the jurisdictions below official projected subnational forest reference levels. These declines in deforestation represent approximately 6.8 GtCO2 e of avoided carbon emissions, attributable to both subnational and national policy interventions and private-sector actions.

The presentation provides brief descriptions of useful landscape tools, resources and standards. These include standard setting initiatives that provide guidance and metrics to measure progress in jurisdictional or landscape initiatives such as the Commodities Jurisdictions Approach (CJA), Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance, and Landscape standard. Performance platforms providing information on jurisdictions and jurisdictional and landscape initiatives using a standard set of criteria highlighted include Governors’ Climate and Forest Platform (GCF), Produce Protect Platform, Landscape Assessment Framework.

The presentation also includes case Studies to highlight different types of jurisdictional and landscape initiatives, such as Produce, Conserve, Include (PCI) in Mato Grosso, Brazil, Jurisdictional Palm Oil Certification, and Carbon Fund in Madre de Dios, Peru. Other resources and related initiatives presented include the Accountability Framework initiative (AFi), Tropical Forest Alliance (TFA), and the Balikpapan Challenge.

Key insights include that to reward early progress, performance metrics need to incorporate process indicators (planning, agreeing on goals, setting baseline); inclusive, multistakeholder platforms that include local government are essential to provide structures and mechanisms for developing local compacts, driving progress and reporting and verification; and there’s a need for clear incentives for local producers, that could be promoted by including goals on improving productivity and/or improving farmer livelihoods.

This report by presents a “commodity-first” lens to identifying key landscapes where supply chain companies can make critical interventions to tackle deforestation. As supply chain actors will likely only engage with geographies in their direct supply chain, it focuses on commodity production and utilises recent data on drivers of deforestation to identify landscapes where deforestation is high, driven largely by the expansion of forest-risk commodities.

The study found that transformative impact will require commodity supply chain companies to broaden their efforts to complement individual supply chain action by engaging in jurisdictional approaches. Over a dozen landscapes are of particular importance given commodity production levels and associated deforestation. Amongst the top producing countries, 14 landscapes exhibit particularly high rates of deforestation, in total accounting for 32 percent of the total deforestation across Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America between 2010 and 2017.

The study also found that a relative lack of jurisdictional approaches in landscapes relevant from a “commodity-first” perspective could create challenges for deeper private sector engagement. Out of about 95 currently active jurisdictional initiatives, only 20 are in the top commodity producing regions. Further, 90 percent of top producing regions of key commodities do not have an active jurisdictional initiative in place.