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.

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.

This chapter from the book “Transforming REDD+: Lessons and new directions” highlights how jurisdictional approaches (JAs) to sustainable development seek to protect forests, reduce emissions, and improve livelihoods and other social, environmental and economic dimensions across entire governmental territories: states, provinces, districts, counties and other political administrative units.

The study explored 39 subnational jurisdictions across 12 countries, which together contain 28% of the world’s tropical forests, and found that all had made formal commitments to reducing deforestation. Most (38 of 39) had also taken concrete actions to implement these pledges. The majority of these sampled jurisdictions have developed and implemented integrated jurisdictional strategies, robust jurisdiction-wide multistakeholder processes, and quantifiable, time-bound targets that define their vision of sustainability – despite a scarcity of international climate finance to support these and other interventions.

Annual deforestation decreased between 2012 and 2017 in just under half of jurisdictions (17 of 39), although any links between actions taken by subnational governments and observed trends in deforestation are yet to be analysed.

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.

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.

This document aims to introduce the jurisdictional approach (JA) and its potential to accelerate the implementation of national priority agendas in Indonesia in its medium-term development plan (RPJMN) for the period of 2020-2024, particularly to achieve sustainable food and agricultural production. Jurisdiction-based multistakeholder approach is offered as an innovative new development model to assist Indonesia achieve SDGs, from the initial perspective of sustainable food and agriculture. The concept note was formulated through a series of meetings and discussions with CSOs facilitated by Indonesia’s Sustainable Districts Association Lingkar Temu Kabupaten Lestari (LTKL) to provide inputs to Indonesia’s National Development Agency (Bappenas).

The concept note elaborates on the definition and components of JA, including the lens of sustainable commodities used in its development, and the benefits and beneficiaries of JA for sustainable food and. It also discusses existing legal basis for the approach in Indonesia, enabling preconditions for its success, and examples from various JA initiatives developed by developmental partners and CSOs throughout Indonesia. Section 6 will provide the reasoning behind the proposal to use this while also demonstrating its potential for other sectors in the future.