Beyond Supply Chains: Pulp, Paper and Packaging Companies Take Landscape Action for Sustainability at Scale

This report explores why and how downstream and midstream companies are engaging at landscape scale to achieve sustainable land use in pulp, paper and packaging (PPP) production areas. Companies engage at this scale to meet their own sustainability commitments and improve relationships with local communities and stakeholders.

The study identified 32 landscape initiatives in pulp production areas in nine countries, including Brazil, Canada, Indonesia and Portugal, and at least 26 downstream and midstream companies supporting them. The majority of these companies are integrated corporations, that play dual roles as producers and processors or manufacturers of paper products.

Recommendations for these companies are:

• Improve their understanding of landscape approaches and their components in order to benefit more from multistakeholder collaborations;
• Downstream companies need to invest in PPP landscapes to tackle systemic issues;
• Increase collaboration with other companies and within the same PPP landscapes; and
• Actively engage more stakeholder groups.

The report contains additional recommendations targeted at other stakeholders in PPP landscapes looking to mobilize more private sector action.

The findings and recommendations in the report are drawn upon data collected through interviews with key PPP stakeholders, including companies and landscape initiative implementers, as well as through an analysis of company responses to CDP’s forest questionnaire in 2022. This study is a collaboration between the Tropical Forest Alliance, Proforest, and CDP.

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This report is part of a global study that aims to understand how midstream and downstream companies have been using landscape and jurisdictional approaches to address commodity-driven deforestation. The study includes five commodity specific reports on cocoa, palm oil, pulp, paper and packaging, beef and soy landscape-scale action as well as a final summary report. The study also delves deeper into other possible uses of these approaches, in a report on meeting corporate climate, nature and people goals.